


The Parent Snap

by follow_the_sun



Series: Odinbrood Adventures [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Complete, Endgame Fix-It, Fix-It, Found Family, Kid Fic, Kid Hela (Marvel), Kid Loki and Kid Thor (Marvel), M/M, More Intergalactic Cheese Smuggling Than You Might Expect in a Domestic AU, Parallel Universes, Post-Endgame, Siblings, Strong Opinions About Goats, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2019-12-29 22:37:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 54,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18303218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: Bucky Barnes thinks Odin's children got a bad deal, so he engages in a little light kidnapping to give them the happiness they deserve. One day, Hela, Thor, and Loki decide to return the favor.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> 100% of the credit for this premise goes to [amusewithaview](https://amusewithaview.tumblr.com/), who came up with the marvelous concept of Bucky time-traveling to kidnap the Odinbrood _and_ the nature of Steve's involvement. (Their original Tumblr post is [HERE,](https://amusewithaview.tumblr.com/post/181728296350/please-do-write-a-time-traveler-stealing-odins) but please be warned that it contains spoilers for the entire story.
> 
> I have also ~~stolen~~ solicited a great number of ideas from [Beradan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beradan) and [RobynGoodfellow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/robyngoodfellow) along the way, and you should check out their work as well. 
> 
> Tagged as Endgame fix-it even though most of this was developed and/or written before Endgame's release; not making any tweaks because I prefer to think this story is one of many, many, _many_ possibilities in the multiverse.
> 
> This seems likely to become a series; subscribe if you want to be the first to know if there's a sequel. Plotbunnies are gratefully accepted.
> 
> The Sacred Reznor is explained [here.](http://lasrina.tumblr.com/post/152920792215/it-has-come-to-my-attention) It is a good space pig and we love it.

If Bucky was really honest about it, the truth was, he’d always known it was going to end with Steve sacrificing himself to save the world. Yeah, at the time he was in a bigger body than the little scrappy one only Bucky remembered, and it happened in a way weirder war than the Big One, but at the end of the day, that stuff was almost immaterial. And it wasn’t like Bucky had never thought about this possibility of being left behind. He loved Steve with all his heart and soul, but when it came down to it, he was a realist. And Steve—Steve had always been the guy who’d lay down on a wire, let another soldier crawl over him to survival, without thinking about what it would cost either himself _or_ the other guy when he did.

Bucky had spent a lot of time talking to other people while he was stuck in the Soul Stone—he could argue all day about whether it was actually Limbo or Purgatory or something else entirely, but half the world had ended up there, so at least it wasn’t lonely. And while he was there, Strange—which definitely wasn’t the guy’s real name, the spider-kid was right about that—tried to “educate” him on a bunch of half-scientific, half-mystical mumbo-jumbo called multiverse theory. As far as Bucky could tell, it boiled down to the idea that some real scientists in the real world sincerely believed that every choice you ever made created its own baby universe, which meant that somewhere there was another version of you who got to live with it. By that logic, there was a world out there in the multiverse where Steve survived and he, Bucky, was the one who didn’t. And there was probably another world still where they were both fine and dandy and retired to a crappy little apartment in Brooklyn, where they sat on their asses all day playing Mario Kart and the biggest problem they had was whether they were out of Steve’s favorite sugary breakfast cereal. It made it a little easier if he could believe that somewhere, there was a world that didn’t have to lose quite so much in order to win.

Not easy, but _easier._ Hell, if Bucky could think that somewhere there was a Steve who was actually okay, and that asshole would give him a disappointed look for giving up, then maybe he could keep going, at least for a little while.

So, for Alternate Universe Imaginary Steve’s sake, Bucky tried to do all the stuff a relatively healthy bereaved person was supposed to do. He gave himself space to mourn and feel his feelings and all that jazz, and he went to the funeral and put flowers on Steve’s grave, but it all felt kind of unreal. He even tried, tentatively, to hang out with the remaining Avengers—a newly chastened Tony Stark seemed to think he owed Bucky something, and he wasn’t exactly wrong about that—but at the end of the day, they were Steve’s friends, not his, and their presence just enhanced Steve’s absence. That was why it was surprising when Thor approached him as he was putting on his jacket and preparing to head back to Brooklyn. He was even more surprised when Thor put a hand on his shoulder and, instead of repeating the same trite line everybody else had given him about how he was so sorry about Steve’s passing, he said, “I have a favor to ask you, my friend.”

“Yeah, okay,” Bucky said, because really, what was he gonna say, no? Whatever Thor wanted, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do.

“Take this,” said Thor, and held out the Time Stone.

Bucky stared at it. Liberated from Thanos’s ugly gold gauntlet and returned to its original container, it was a small green gem in an eye-shaped gold necklace that fit neatly into the big Asgardian’s fist. Plenty of thoughts crossed his mind in that moment, but the one that came out of his mouth was, “You sure you wanna give that to a human again? Because I don’t think we did such a bang-up job with it the first time around.”

“That’s exactly why you should have it,” Thor said seriously. “Because no one will expect us to make the same mistake twice.”

Bucky wished he could tell if the guy was kidding. “Honestly, though,” he said, “why me?”

“Because you can keep it hidden. You can keep it safe. And you can put it somewhere it will never threaten the universe again.”

“No pressure,” Bucky said dryly. “You do realize I’m limited to just the one planet, though, which doesn’t really seem to be a deterrent when you space guys get involved.”

“Well,” Thor said, and that was when things got interesting.

 

The spaceship was a big transport that had been salvaged off some planet called Sakaar, and while it was parked in a remote corner of Norway, a few of the remaining Asgardians had cleaned it and painted it and retrofitted it into something that felt more like a luxury yacht than the clunky spacefaring hulk that Thor described from its initial journey. Some of the swooping curves and gleaming metal of the control room felt more Art Deco than alien, to the point where Bucky almost— _almost—_ wondered if Thor had given his spaceship designers a pile of books about the 1940s and told them to go nuts. Honestly, though, Bucky was more interested in the nuts and bolts of an actual, working spaceship, and it didn’t disappoint him there, either. The engines ran on something that sounded like super-refined vibranium and would haul him around the galaxy for decades before they needed replenishing; the nav system made Stark’s F.R.I.D.A.Y. look like a disoriented toddler; and the computer held workups on hundreds, maybe thousands of planets, which, Thor said, Bucky could sort through at his leisure until he found one that was satisfactory. Bucky tried to hold onto his habitual cynicism while Thor gave him the guided tour, but he had to admit that by the end of it, he felt a kind of… well… a kind of _wonder_ he hadn’t really felt since he watched a flying car lift off the ground in 1943.

There was never any question whether he was going to say yes.

“So what would you do?” he asked, once he’d gone through all his preparations, said his goodbyes (Shuri, in particular, he wished was going with him—she’d rigged up a communication ray that would let them send messages back and forth, but it wouldn’t be the same), and Thor had metaphorically handed him the keys (he’d actually undergone a complete biometric scan that told the ship to trust him, but that was no fun to say). “What would you do, if you had the whole universe at your fingertips?”

“But I do, my friend,” Thor said, giving Bucky a lopsided grin. “And right now, I’m exactly where I want to be.”

Of course he was. Thor still had a chance to be with someone he loved. Bucky tried not to let the thought be too deeply tainted with bitterness. “Okay,” he tried again, “then let’s say you felt like you had a couple of things to atone for, and that you decided what you should do is try to keep as many people from suffering as you possibly could.”

Thor considered it. “In that case,” he said, “I suppose I’d have to do something about my sister.”

“Sister?” Bucky repeated.

“Her name was Hela. She was the goddess of death.”

“No shit.”

“Indeed, much shit,” said Thor. “She murdered millions, perhaps billions at my father’s command, and many more after he cast her aside. As with my brother Loki, I don’t believe she was blameless, but neither was she entirely at fault. My father… I’ve come to accept that, for all he was the god of wisdom, perhaps he wasn’t the best at raising children.”

“How old was your sister when Odin had her start killing people?” said Bucky, and he almost immediately wished he hadn’t asked, because Thor told him.

 

People in movies about time travel got really paranoid about how the tiny unintentional consequences of their actions could end up changing history, or worse, creating a paradox that would ultimately destroy the universe. Bucky’s opinion was that history was mostly a shitshow anyway, and as for the whole paradox thing, he felt pretty sure that if he tried to go back in time and change things, then either 1) anything that would cause a paradox just wouldn’t work, because the thing had clearly already happened; or 2) it would count as a decision, which would spin off one of those new universes that Doctor Quantum McMagicPants was always on about; or 3) worst case, it would only catch _him_ in the infinite unbreakable time loop, which would probably suck only slightly more than what Hydra used to do to him on an average Tuesday.

Hence: Asgard, 10,000 BCE, give or take a decade or ten. (He’d put the ship’s computer in charge of translating time into terms he could get his brain around, but it had seemed kind of fuzzy on the human concept of leap years.)

Hiding a landing shuttle in a floating city in the middle of space and making his way through a royal palace into the princess’s bedroom would have been a tall order, even for the Winter Soldier. Fortunately for Bucky, the ship came with something that Thor had told him the official name of, which he’d immediately discarded from his patchwork memory in favor of referring to it as “the ‘beam me up’ thing from Star Trek,” a show Shuri had made him watch because she thought it was funny. The upshot of which was, it was really no big thing to materialize himself inside the bedroom of the crown princess of Asgard.

The princess who was six years old, and crying.

Bucky had been through a lot of shit in his life, and contrary to popular opinion, suffering didn’t necessarily make a guy stronger or smarter or better. Sometimes suffering was just suffering, end of story. But a crying little girl? Bucky had grown up with three little sisters, and this was a situation he was actually kind of qualified to handle.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, quietly, so he wouldn’t startle her too bad. “Rough day?”

There was a bad moment where the little girl just stared at him, and Bucky waited for her to scream and bring palace security crashing down on his head before he could smash the button to reverse the teleport. But in the end, Hela swiped the back of her hand across her tear-stained cheeks and said, in a voice that was more curious than scared, “Who are you?”

“My name’s Bucky.” Bucky approached her carefully—again, she might be tiny, but she was a tiny _goddess of death,_ and he knew too much about the Red Room to assume that something was harmless just because it was little-girl-shaped. “I can be your friend, if you want. Kind of looks like you could use one right now. Do you wanna talk about it?”

The tiny goddess of death sniffled. “My daddy—he said I, I had to—”

“Did he ask you to hurt some people?” Bucky said, as gently as he could.

Hela nodded. “I didn’t want to,” she said. “But he said… he said that’s my purpose.”

“Yeah,” said Bucky. “People used to say that to me, too.” He took a deep breath. “Hela, if you really don’t like hurting people, I can give you a choice. I could take you someplace where you never have to hurt people again. But you’d have to go with me right now, tonight. You couldn’t say goodbye to your mom and dad first, and you might not ever see them again. I know that’s a pretty awful thing to ask you to decide. But if you stay here, I think your dad will ask you to do a lot worse things than what you did today. Whatever you decide, it’s completely up to you, okay?”

Hela was silent for a long moment, and Bucky held his breath while, not for the first or last time, the weight of the future hung by a thread. Then Hela made her decision, and this time, the multiverse fractured in Bucky’s favor. She reached out her small hand to him, and he was about to take it when she abruptly flung herself into his arms instead.

Until that moment—until that very _instant_ —Bucky Barnes might have been entertaining some thoughts of taking Hela and dumping her off on, say, for example, Pepper Potts, who came across as one of the most stable and put-together people he’d ever met and therefore more than capable of dealing with a single alien murderbaby. He might have thought about taking her to Brooklyn in 1940 and handing her to his cousin Louise, who’d tried and failed to have a baby of her own for years and still hadn’t managed it by the time he’d gone off to war, or—fuck, this one was a really long shot, but maybe he even would’ve said _damn the time paradoxes_ and given her to Sarah Rogers, who had a proven track record of raising amazing kids in spite of some fairly shitty circumstances. But when Hela’s little body shuddered against his metal shoulder, Bucky could almost feel those alternate universes closing themselves off, one by one, because there was no way in hell he was doing anything but devoting the rest of his life to making sure this kid was as well and happy as she could possibly be, and that she never, ever, _ever_ got forced to kill anybody ever again.

“Hela,” he said, “hang onto me,” and he pushed the button that would teleport both of them back to the spaceship.

It wasn’t until they were back on the ship, and Hela’s sobs had subsided into occasional hiccupping gasps, that something else occurred to Bucky. He drew back and held her out at arm’s length, looking into her tearstained face solemnly. “Hey, Hela,” he said, “do you think you might like to have a little brother?”


	2. Chapter 2

**_Eight Years Later_ **

“Kids! You’re going to be late!”

Bucky stood by the teleporter pad in the _Mae West_ ’s galley, shouting towards the upper deck. After eight years of parenting, he’d found some good ways to smooth out the process, but he’d eventually made peace with the fact that trying to get three kids out of bed in the morning and out of the house in time for school was always going to suck. “Oh, hell, no,” he said, as Hela came into the kitchen, liquid eyeliner pen in one hand, backpack in the other. “No, we’ve had this argument already, I’m all for you expressing yourself, but the black leather jumpsuit is _not_ a middle-school-appropriate outfit. Go put on something that won’t get me a call from your principal, this isn’t up for discussion. And see what’s taking your little brothers so long while you’re at it.”

“Why do I have to be in charge of them?” Hela was at the age where her voice could rise to a shriek at the slightest provocation. “It’s not fair!”

“No, it isn’t, but you’re the oldest, and you’re getting zero sympathy from my tired three-little-sisters-having ass,” Bucky told her, waving vaguely with the butter knife in his hand. “Go. _Now._ Jesus. And yes, Rez, I know you still need breakfast,” he added, turning to the soft furry creature that had just butted up against him, “but _you_ know you don’t get it till the kids’ lunches are made, so you can keep your hair on for another ten minutes.”

The Sacred Reznor shot Bucky a reproachful look. It was a gray-furred animal that looked like a stump-tailed, fat-bellied aardvark. As far as Bucky could tell, there was only one of it in the universe, and also, as far as he could tell, it was slightly dumber than a particularly obtuse Golden Retriever. It rubbed against Bucky’s pants leg and gave a small, sad whine.

Bucky fixed the Reznor with a glare, and it made a grumbling sound and retreated to its crate, where it lay down on the blanket with a huff. “Yes, yes, I agree, it’s very tragic how nobody has ever fed you anything in your entire life, ever,” Bucky was telling it, when a sudden scream echoed through the _Mae West_ ’s corridors.

Bucky had learned early, in his long and strange lifetime, that you got three kinds of screams in a house with small children. The first kind was the play scream, which had a recognizable note of exuberance in it. The second was the startled and angry scream, which was what you got, for example, when you dropped a frog down the back of your sister’s dress (not that Bucky had ever done that to Becca, and even if he had, the punishment his mother had dished out had still been totally unreasonable). The third kind was a legitimate pain- or fear-scream, and when you heard that one, you dropped what you were doing and ran towards it. This one had been short and sharp, over quickly enough that the logical part of Bucky’s brain was fairly sure no one was actively dying. But the logical part of his brain was solidly in the minority on this one, because that was his kid, it was his _kid_ who was scared and maybe really hurt, and Bucky probably broke a land-speed record on his way down the _Mae_ ’s central hallway.

Which was what made it so fucking aggravating when he rounded the corner and found Thor with his hand clapped over his ribcage, a thin trickle of blood oozing out from under his fingers, and Loki literally rolling on the floor because that was how hard he was laughing.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” Bucky said, and allowed himself the space of two deep breaths to slump against the doorframe and try to get his heart rate back to normal. “Okay, let’s see how bad it is,” he said, as soon as he was sure he could talk without his voice shaking, pushing Thor’s hand aside and tugging up his shirt. The wound itself was barely an inch long, and right over a rib, which meant whatever had cut him hadn’t gone in more than a couple of millimeters, but it was still going to need medical attention. “Bathroom,” he told Thor, “now. And while we’re cleaning that up, which of you wants to tell me what _stupid_ thing the two of you got up to that caused this?”

“Loki turned into a snake!” Thor blurted, drawn up to his full eight-year-old height, with his blue eyes the size of dinner plates and his expression as offended as Bucky had ever seen it. “Because he knows I love snakes! And I went to pick up the snake to admire it and he turned back into himself and he was like, ‘Blergh! It’s me,’ and then he stabbed me!”

“Loki Steven Laufeyson Barnes!” Bucky snapped, rounding on the youngest of his terrible children. “How many times do we have to talk about this, we _do not stab our siblings in this household!”_

Loki was still on the floor, gasping for breath between gales of laughter. “If you saw his face,” he began.

“No! This is not funny! Arrrgh.” Bucky clapped a hand over his eyes and made himself take another long, slow breath, silently repeating a line that had become his mantra sometime in these last few years: _Kids don’t have fully developed frontal lobes yet; kids are still figuring out that actions have consequences._ “Grounded,” he told Loki. “Two weeks. School extracurriculars only, and the rest of the time you’re in your room with no holovids. Also, I’m taking your knives, and you can have them back when _I_ decide you’ve gone long enough without doing bodily harm to any other living beings.”

Loki’s face started to crumple. “But, Dad—”

“You’ve got two weeks now, did you want to make it three?”

_“Daaaaaaaaaad,”_ Loki said, but he didn’t push it further than that. Bucky slung an arm around Thor’s shoulders, guiding him toward the bathroom. “Hey,” he said, sitting Thor down on the edge of the tub, “are you really okay, kiddo?”

Thor nodded, although his lip quivered a little when Bucky brought out the alcohol swabs. “It’s okay. It was— _ow_ —it was my fault for touching the snake,” he said, with an air of determined bravery.

“Okay, yeah, I guess we probably should have a talk about picking up potentially venomous animals that _don’t belong on a spaceship,_ but this one really isn’t your fault, kid. Look, I appreciate you trying to give Loki a pass, but this is on him, and he deserves to get punished for it. Even though I know he wasn’t really trying to hurt you. In fact, I’m pretty sure one day you’re gonna look back on this and think it’s a pretty funny story.” Keeping up a string of chatter while he worked had been almost the first trick Bucky learned when he was patching up a small Steve Rogers, back in what felt like about ten lifetimes ago; he’d been tacking butterfly sutures over the cut as he spoke, and now he stuck a Band-Aid over them and patted Thor on his small shoulder. “Go get a new shirt on, because now we’ve really gotta hustle to get you to school, okay?”

“Okay.”

Thor took off at a run—the kid careened off the _Mae_ ’s walls so often that he was usually a mess of bruises; a little light stabbing was almost nothing by comparison—and Bucky hustled back down to the galley to finish tossing sandwiches and fruit into lunch bags. Thank God, Hela had done what he’d asked and actually put some reasonable clothes on—the black cold-shoulder sweater and silver skull necklace were still pushing the boundaries of the middle-school dress code, but at least the new skirt wasn’t literally too tight for her to walk in—so he didn’t have to deal with a teenage sulking fit too. He handed her a lunch bag, and she frowned at it. “You remembered to make it vegan, right, Dad?”

“Oh, no,” Bucky said, widening his eyes in mock horror. “I forgot and used the _non-_ cruelty-free peanut butter on your sandwich today.”

“Dad!”

“I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of tiny peanut voices cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.”

_“Daaad.”_ All the same, Hela stood on her tiptoes to hug him, just like she’d done every day since she started school. “Love you, Dad,” she said, and just like _he’d_ done every day since he’d taken her out of Asgard, he shut his eyes briefly, sending up one quick prayer to the spirits of Steve, Sarah, Fred, and any other benevolent Rogerses who might be listening that he’d done the right thing.

“Love you, too, kiddo,” he said, and then she was gone, blinking through the teleporter in a flash of green light. Eventually, she wasn’t even going to need the teleporter to go down to the planet, a thought that made Bucky feel older than any of Natasha’s stupid “Happy You’re So Old This Pastry is a Fire Hazard” birthday cakes ever did. “C’mere,” he said to Thor, who was shoving things wildly into his backpack, and Loki, who was trying and failing to slink past him unnoticed, and pulled them both in for hugs, too, before he handed over the other two lunch bags. “One truly revolting peanut butter, marshmallow fluff, and salami sandwich for Loki, and one only slightly less horrible bilgesnipe sausage-and-American cheese sandwich for Thor, and if you decide you’re not in the mood for these at lunchtime, please eat them anyway and don’t try to trade them to the other kids, I really don’t need any calls from parents whose kids don’t have Asgardian digestive systems tonight. Now, what are we gonna do at school today?”

“Study hard,” Thor recited, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

“Don’t stab anybody,” Loki said, in a similarly flat tone.

“Perfect. Love you both. Make good choices,” Bucky called after them, as they both stepped onto the teleporter pad and vanished in quick succession. “They make it to planetside all right, Mae?”

“All clear,” the ship’s computer informed him, in a sultry female voice with a hint of an old-fashioned New York accent. It was probably kind of silly to name his spaceship after his childhood celebrity crush, but first off, if Peter Quill could do it, so could he, and second, a former mind-controlled Hydra assassin raising three space children as a single parent had earned a little ridiculous self-indulgence. And then, just as he was about to go throw some kibble in the poor, starving Sacred Reznor’s food dish, Mae added, “Incoming transmission from unidentified vessel. Accept?”

“What the hell?” Bucky said. Visitors didn’t just drop in, this far out in space; for that matter, a person didn’t exactly take up permanent residence in a spaceship tethered to an asteroid orbiting a planet that was literally called Knowhere if they were hoping for a lot of company. “Who is it?”

“Unknown.”

“Fuck,” Bucky said fervently, sending up a second silent prayer that nobody from the past—either his or the kids’—had tracked him down for some kind of misguided attempt at revenge. So help him, if he had to kill somebody and he hadn’t even had his second cup of coffee yet… He perched on a stool at the kitchen table. If he pressed his metal fingers into the slots under the countertop just so, the counter would flip up, revealing a weapons rack that Stark had referred to as “some pretty intense paranoia there, pal,” and Natasha had nodded at approvingly. After he had just about every kind of gun or blade a person could reasonably want to defend themselves and their three kidnapped royal children literally at his fingertips, he took a deep breath and said, “Put it on the screen.”

“About krutacking time,” said a sharp voice, as the signal resolved from static to a flickering visual—and Bucky made a rapid cycle from disbelief to delighted surprise.

“You’re a hard man to find, Barnesy,” said Rocket Raccoon. “You ready to give me that arm yet?”

 

“So what’s your hustle these days?” Rocket asked, once he’d come aboard the ship and the usual pleasantries had been exchanged. The usual alcohol had been exchanged, too—Bucky didn’t usually day drink, but he didn’t usually get surprise visits from old war buddies, either. Besides, one of the advantages of living in space was that it really _was_ always five o’clock somewhere. “I know you’re up to something, living like a king with your ship orbiting around a classy place like Knowhere and all. So what are you dealing out here, anyway? Weapons? Drugs? Energy cores?”

“Cheese,” said Bucky.

“...What,” said Rocket.

“It’s kind of a long story,” said Bucky.

“Pal, for the story of how the Winter Soldier became a galactic cheese smuggler, I got nothin’ but time.”

“It’s not smuggling. It’s a legitimate business interest. See, the country I come from, back on Earth, the United States, they have a _lot_ of cows, right?” Bucky began. “And it’s in everybody’s interests to keep the price of milk high enough that dairy farms stay in business. But humans keep figuring out how to get cows to make more milk, even when we’re drinking less of it. Milk doesn’t keep more than a couple days in storage, but if you make it into cheese, it can last practically forever. Hard cheese doesn’t break down like most things in nature, either—it can get moldy and gross, but it doesn’t really decay, so however much you put in cold storage, you have basically the same amount of it years later. Throw in a little well-meaning but ultimately misguided government interference, and you wind up with a couple hundred thousand _tons_ of cheese that nobody knows what to do with. Back when me and Steve were kids, they actually started a program where they were literally giving the stuff away, and somehow they still wound up with so much government cheese that they can never unload it all on Earth without crashing the market. So I thought, you know where they don’t have cows?”

Rocket was starting to get that look of someone who not only couldn’t tell whether they were being taken for a ride, but also couldn’t quite decide whether they _wanted_ to believe it. “Space?”

“Space. Turns out people on other planets also love cheese, but they don’t want to keep the cows to make it. Nobody but Earth is stupid enough to put up with all the methane and cow shit, I guess.”

“So I’m supposed to believe you just had this brainwave to start an import/export business selling cheese to alien planets?”

“Believe whatever you want,” Bucky told him, smothering a laugh at the expression on Rocket’s furry face. “But the next planet you go to, ask how many people there have heard of American cheese. I bet you’ll be surprised. And if they haven’t, let me know where I can find a new market. Anyway, it’s a good job. I do a couple supply runs to Earth every year, and beyond that, I mostly handle the logistics while the kids are in school.”

“Yeah, about those kids,” Rocket said, settling back in his seat. He took a long pull of his beer, belched, and scratched his stomach. “You wanna tell me how you swiped not one, not two, but _three_ Asgardian royal offspring out of the palace without their mom and dad personally coming after you and shoving that metal arm so far up your ass that you could taste it?”

“Thanks, buddy. I really needed that visual.” Bucky took a sip from his own bottle. Well, he supposed there was no harm in telling the story; for an overgrown space rodent, Rocket was surprisingly good with secrets. “Actually, Frigga was the one who let me take them.”

“Odin’s wife? No. No way was she in on it. What I heard, she was none too happy when the first kid went missing, but she about just ripped Asgard in half when the next two did.”

“Well, here’s a little-known fact about Frigga, Rocket. You know what she’s the goddess of?” Bucky paused for effect. “Destiny. She knew Asgard was headed for its darkest timeline if those kids stayed with her and Odin, and she knew she couldn’t do anything to change that. But I could. So, yeah, you’re right: after I took Hela, they quadrupled security on the next two kids. I wasn’t even sure I could get out of the palace with Loki. Between you and me, I just about shit myself when Frigga showed up in the nursery. But you know what she did? Handed me baby Thor and said, ‘Take him too. They need each other.’ And so,” Bucky finished, “I did. I’d love to take credit for throwing Odin off the trail by bringing them this far into the future, but I’m pretty sure Frigga is the one who really pulled the strings.”

“Yeah, and all you did was create a time paradox that could’ve destroyed the universe,” Rocket observed. “So if you yoinked them out of their timeline and they never did all the stuff we remember, then how come you and me still know about the original version, so to speak? And what happened to the Thor who gave you this spaceship?”

“Search me,” said Bucky. “As far as I can tell, a lot of people who fought in the Infinity War remember the same shit I do, but most other humans on Earth never heard of Asgardians at all. Shuri got real excited when I told her about it, started typing at me in all caps about something called the Mandela Effect and how I might’ve just proved the existence of timestream collisions in near-parallel universes, but any time somebody says _quantum_ I kind of zone out. Honestly? I don’t worry about it. My job is to look after my own kids now, and beyond that, the universe can take care of itself.” That part wasn’t entirely true, but Rocket didn’t need to know it. “What about you? Not that I don’t appreciate the visit, but what brings you all the way out to Knowhere?”

“Yeah, well, about that.” Rocket swigged from the beer bottle again. “I kinda got this problem I was hoping you might help me with.”

Bucky felt himself slump. So Rocket hadn’t bought his story, after all. It probably had been too much to hope that a former mercenary, current whatever-he-was wouldn’t figure out the truth: that a ship transporting high-quality Earth cheese all over the galaxy on completely legitimate permits could get away with small detours to just about anywhere, and that a hull full of cheese was a great place to hide anything else that needed to be moved from place to place. Such as species-specific vaccines that one batch of aliens didn’t want another batch of aliens to get, for example, or refugees who hadn’t been rich or lucky enough to buy their way off a war-torn planet. Or, for a totally hypothetical random thought experiment, maybe even a Sacred Reznor that a guy might just happen to spot in an alien palace when his local contact took him on a sightseeing tour, and which might somehow mysteriously find its way off the planet tucked inside a stranger’s jacket because it had been small, and alone, and it had looked scared.

Bucky wasn’t worried that Rocket had been hired for a hit job. If he had, he wouldn’t have been dumb enough to let the Winter Soldier see him coming. But a little light blackmail? Yeah, that he’d do. And whatever it was he wanted, Bucky was going to have to do it, because he might not be their biological father, but there was nothing, _nothing,_ that he wouldn’t do for his kids.

Rocket reached into the pack he’d dropped beside his seat when he came in, and Bucky stiffened, reflexively, in spite of everything, because logic was one thing, but his old fighting instincts still weren’t convinced that they might not have to show up at any moment to save the day. But what Rocket brought out was nothing more sinister than a little device that he recognized immediately as a teleporter control. He punched in a code, and the _Mae_ ’s teleporter hummed to life and lit up briefly, and then…

Okay, Bucky had met Groot before, so it wasn’t a shock or anything. But the Groot he’d met back in the war had been roughly human-sized, while this one was closer to the size and shape that Thor and Loki had been at age six or so. And even beyond that… well, Bucky tried not to be speciesist, God knew he’d met all _kinds_ of aliens and a lot of them had given him some surprisingly large amounts of money for bringing them cheese, so he tried not to let anybody’s appearance affect him. But goddamn it, there was just a part of his tired, mutilated brain that was never going to get used to the whole idea of a walking tree.

“Hey, Groot,” he said. “You’re, uh, looking a little smaller than you were last time I saw you, buddy.”

“I am Groot,” said Groot.

“Yeah, we ran into some trouble a while back,” Rocket said, “and long story short, it turns out Groot can come back from just about anything, given a glass of water and a nice sunny window. But that’s twice it’s happened now, and every time, he takes a little longer to get back to normal—not to mention I swear, he comes back dumber every time it happens—”

“I am Groot!”

“You’re just provin’ my point there, champ. Anyway, we both feel like maybe we’d prefer not to go through that kind of stress again. Hey! Groot, don’t put that in your mouth,” Rocket added, his rough voice slipping into a tone that was immediately and intimately familiar to Bucky. He’d never thought he’d see the day when Rocket sounded paternal. “So, yeah, I heard as how you’d settled down, become a family man, and I was thinking maybe the two of us could join up with the four of you for a while. You know, safety in numbers.”

“You can’t stay on the _Mae West,”_ Bucky said immediately. He valued waking up with both arms attached _way_ too much for that.

“Nah, nothin’ like that. No offense, but you couldn’t pay me enough to live in this chrome-plated Sakaarian dump with that weird mutant animal you call a pet. We got our own place, and I think I’ve finally got the damn thing Groot-proofed. I was just gonna maybe tether my ship next to yours, seeing as you already scoped out the school district and everything. Figured you could give me the lay of the land, hook me up with some work, that kind of thing.”

Bucky let himself grin at that. “Well, I can’t really say no to a fellow single parent,” he said, making a mock-toasting motion with his beer bottle.

“Yeah, that’s right. You human types usually pair off to raise kids, don’t you?” Rocket looked at him speculatively. “For that matter, how come you haven’t coupled up with somebody? Plenty of women on Knowhere. Even an ugly pink guy like you oughta be able to get some action.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. He wasn’t even going to touch the part about it having to be a woman; it wasn’t that Rocket was trying to be an asshole—for once—but his ignorance of human culture ran so deep that explaining why that was offensive would’ve been like trying to teach algebra to the Sacred Reznor. To the main point, he said, “Yeah, well, I guess when you’re a hundred-and-eight-year-old brain-damaged human assassin raising two Asgardians and a frost giant on a spaceship, it’s just a little hard to find people with shared life experience.”

“Eeugh, that’s right, I forgot you humans aren’t just ugly, you always gotta  _talk_ about everything, ’stead of getting down to business like sensible people. Gross.”

“You ever considered you might be aromantic, Rocket?”

“Hey, fuck you, I took a bath like four days ago,” Rocket said, which Bucky took as proof of his earlier point. “So, really, it’s just you and the Odinbrood then? Because some days, I’m not kidding, pal, I’ve only got the one kid running around and there’s times I’d like to drop-kick him into the nearest supernova.”

“I am Groot!”

“Of _course_ I love you,” Rocket said, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t be an asshole. Look what you’re doing right now, I _just_ told you not to chew on power cords and what are you doing, huh? Oh, yeah, put it behind your back because if I can’t see it, I’ll forget. You see that, Barnes? This is the shit I put up with.”

“It’s normal to get frustrated,” Bucky said, trying not to laugh. “It gets easier with time. I’ll loan you a book.”

He let Rocket change the subject after that, and they spent a while talking about the state of things on Knowhere, everything from the possibility of getting a talking tree into the local school system to the best place to get a drink and make some underworld connections, and if Rocket noticed that Bucky knew an awful lot about the second kind of thing for a completely legitimate food importer, he kept it to himself. But after Rocket had taken Groot and gone back to his own ship, Bucky found himself wandering around the control room aimlessly, feeling restless and distracted. The visit had stirred up memories he’d thought he’d buried years ago, and once he realized they weren’t going to settle down, Bucky knew there was nothing for it but to go into his room and dig out the box from under the bed.

He only let himself do this once in a while, which he was pretty sure his old therapist, back in Wakanda, would’ve said was stupid—that he should seek out anything that helped him get through the rough spots, instead of trying to suffer through them in silence. What Bucky had never been able to articulate, maybe because his only analogy for it was something out of the Asset days, was that it was like re-breaking a bone that had started to heal in order to set it. He was only going to feel better after he’d allowed himself to be ripped up again.

The box was an old metal ammo case, vintage, just like he was, and not only padlocked but almost rusted shut; the plan had been that the kids wouldn’t be able to get into it even if they did find the key, although it was probably time to rethink that, because with his luck they’d just all wind up needing tetanus shots. And honestly, it wasn’t like most of the stuff in the box would’ve meant anything to anybody but him. He’d never really been able to recover any of his own stuff from before 1943, but there were a couple of things he’d scrounged up here and there. A photo of his sister Becca from 1948, older than he’d ever seen her, holding the infant daughter who’d been a grandmother herself by the time Bucky thought to go looking. An old subway token he’d found on the street on the way to Stark Tower; New York City had long since gone over to Metrocards, but it was still a piece of home. Fifty-seven cents in American coins that he’d had in his pocket when he left Earth, which he’d hung onto for no reason except that they felt lucky. A postcard Steve had handed him after one of his Wakanda missions, joking about how he hadn’t been able to find a stamp; he’d always refused to talk about where he went on T’Challa’s behalf, but Bucky would’ve had to be an idiot not to realize it was a painting from the Louvre, and that was Steve’s way of telling him without telling him, so to speak. And all the way at the bottom of the box, Steve’s dog tags—the final set, the S.H.I.E.L.D. ones, which he’d kept right on wearing after S.H.I.E.L.D. dissolved, and even later, after the Accords made him a war criminal in the country that had never wanted to see him as anything but a hero.

Bucky held the tags in his right hand and pressed it to his heart, bowing his head and closing his eyes. “God, I miss you so much, Steve,” he murmured, and for a long time he sat like that, so still that if there had been anyone to see him, they would’ve thought he was frozen in cryo again. But after a while, he had to get up, because the kids were gonna be home from school, and they were gonna be hungry and need help with their homework, and the Sacred Reznor was gonna need its litter box scooped, and life was gonna go on, and he wasn’t doing himself or anybody else any favors if he acted like it wasn’t. So he slid the box back under his bed and got up to check whether the yaro root was ripe enough to slice up for after-school snacks yet, and the kids came home, and by the time he’d gotten them tucked into bed for the night, life had slipped back into its normal smooth rhythm.

And that might have been where it ended, if the next day hadn’t been parent-teacher conferences.


	3. Chapter 3

As a brand new parent of space children, Bucky had learned early on that there was one surprising universal constant in the galaxy, and it was that all elementary schools were basically the same. Oh, sure, the one his kids attended had a thirty-four-letter alphabet tacked up on the wall and a holograph of the Queen of Xandar where his brain insisted the portrait of George Washington should be, but the kid-sized desks and coat cubbies could’ve been zapped there directly from Sister Mary Frances’s classroom in Red Hook in 1925. And then there was the smell. It wasn’t a  _ bad  _ smell, exactly, just something about the combination of warm kid bodies, stale air, craft supplies, and the crumbs from the bottom of lunchboxes. It was the kind of thing that lurked almost below the level of conscious notice, but whenever it hit him, he had to pause for a minute and do one of his little time-orienting exercises on himself, or else he’d keep unconsciously turning around and looking for the nine-year-old Steve Rogers who should have been a few steps behind him, with his stick-thin wrists sticking out of a secondhand jacket that managed to be too short and too roomy at the same time, lugging a bookbag stuffed with primers from the previous century and handfuls of scribbled pencil drawings where his homework was supposed to be.

“Mx. Barnes?” a voice called out, breaking his reverie, and he looked up to find one of the bright pink Xandarian women looking at him.

In another life, a long time ago, Bucky had been great at turning on the charm. These days it was harder to do it at all, much less on command. “Hi, you must be Mx. Zaay,” he said, careful about the pronunciation. He’d checked her preferred pronouns and made sure he was clear on the local forms of address before he teleported down, because the world could only handle so many Rockets. “Call me Bucky. So you’re Thor and Loki’s teacher?”

“Yes.” There were, Bucky was happy to see, two grownup-sized chairs in the classroom for the occasion; she gestured at one and he took it, while she settled into the other. “I wanted to thank you for coming so far for this. I understand your actual residence is on Knowhere.”

Bucky nodded. There was no reason not to tell her; it was an open secret how things were done. Knowhere existed specifically as a place to conduct business outside the bounds of the law, which meant it didn’t exactly have a tax base to build a good public school system. The thing was, crime bosses were just as eager as anybody to get their kids a quality education. What you did, Bucky had learned, was buy a patch of land on a planet with really top-notch schools, pay your taxes on that land religiously, and send your kids to  _ their  _ schools. It had surprised the crap out of him to find out that the preferred location was Xandar, which was the headquarters of the goddamn Nova Corps. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement, though; Xandar cheerfully raked in the money and kept tabs on the bad guys, and the bad guys steered clear of any serious crime on Xandar itself that might put their arrangements in jeopardy. It also meant the kids got to go out and play in a breathable atmosphere with sunlight, which was good for everybody, because there was only so much Bucky could take of them running around on the ship. “So, how are they doing?” he asked. 

The teacher’s face took on a carefully blank expression. “Well,” she began, “there are a couple of things we should discuss.”

“Thor’s grades are down again, right?” Bucky had come prepared for this one. “Yeah, I must’ve had this talk with him a hundred times. I was the same way at his age, really didn’t understand why academics were important when I could’ve been playing sports, but eventually I figured it out and I’m sure he will, too. He’s a smart kid, he just doesn’t have a lot of patience for sitting still.”

“Actually, Thor is a delight to have in the classroom. It’s your other son I was hoping we could talk about.”

Oh, God. And here he’d been hoping this might actually be a quick and easy meeting. “What’d he do?” said Bucky. 

“Well, Mx. Barnes—Bucky—we don’t really like to focus on individual incidents so much as patterns of behavior—”

“So you’re saying he’s a  _ frequent  _ troublemaker,” Bucky said. “Listen, I made it really clear to his last two teachers that you have to keep Loki busy. He loves drama, and if he gets bored, he’s going to make trouble, that’s all there is to it. If you need to give him extra work to keep him from being disruptive, you absolutely have my permission to do it, and send him to me if he whines about it not being fair. I already hear it about a thousand times a day anyway.”

“Um, yes, well. It’s interesting that you use the word  _ drama,  _ given what happened at recess the other day.”

Bucky gave a deep sigh. “You want to tell me about it?”

“Well, just to be clear, Bucky, your son is a  _ very  _ imaginative child.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And we’ve certainly been covering some  _ intense  _ historical events in our galactic history classes recently. We present the children with very factual versions of those events, but Loki seems to have done some extra reading on his own time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s something we’d ordinarily encourage, a child who shows that kind of initiative.”

“Okay.”

“Then he decided to give the other children a… visual re-enactment of the events he’d read about.” 

“With you so far.”

“It was an assassination.”

“Of course it was.”

“Loki took the role of the victim.”

“Kid does love a good death scene.”

“The children said that the… illusory blood was quite convincing. I’m not sure if he got ahold of some paint or—”

“Yeah, I can guess how he did it. Go on.”

“Also, in this particular case, the victim of the assassination apparently died in a brothel.”

Bucky took a deep breath. “Mx. Zaay, did my child strip himself naked on the playground and pretend to be stabbed to death in front of an audience of all the other eight-year-olds in the school?”

The silence was palpable.

“I see.”

“Some of the other parents had… concerns, when their children told them about the incident,” Zaay said, very carefully.

“I’m right there with them, honestly.”

“Loki showed me a prop knife he says he used, but some of the children claim the one they saw was much more realistic.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry that he’s going to try to stab anybody at school. He knows that’s a hard limit.”

“Has he ever tried to stab anyone at home?”

“...No?” Bucky said carefully.

“Bucky,” the teacher said, leaning forward, “I usually try not to ask the children too much about their home lives, but do you have any sort of co-parenting situation?”

“No, just me.” Bucky flashed the melancholy smile he’d spent a lot of time perfecting for situations like this one. “There was a death in the family. I took them in.” It wasn’t even a lie; technically, he was pretty sure Hela qualified.

“Oh, you poor thing. Three of them, all on your own. You know, Bucky, the best parent in the world would be exhausted under those circumstances.”

“We do pretty well most of the time, I think,” Bucky said, suddenly wary. So help him, if Xandarian Child Protective Services or Nova Corps or any other entity in the galaxy even  _ thought  _ about trying to take his kids— 

“Oh, I’m sure you do. Still, I’m going to send my contact information to your communicator.” Zaay reached out and stroked her pink fingers down the back of his metal hand. “After all, everyone could use someone to talk to now and then.”

Oh.  _ Oh. Fuuuuck,  _ Bucky thought, and drew his hand back, just the barest fraction of an inch. “I appreciate your telling me about this, Mx. Zaay,” he said, in the businesslike tone he usually saved for the most serious cheese supply negotiations. “I’ll talk to Loki. Maybe I need to find him a more appropriate outlet for his creativity. You know, get him into theater camp or something.”

“Oh. Yes.” Zaay looked momentarily disappointed, but she shook it off and pushed her chair back, standing up. “It’s good to see a parent who’s so actively engaged with their children.”

“Yeah, sure,” Bucky agreed vaguely, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was hearing Rocket’s voice all over again, saying,  _ You human types usually pair off to raise kids, don’t you?  _ And now that the sanity of his child-raising plan was being called into question for the second time in two days, it was hard not to wonder if he really was doing the right thing. Sure, people did absolutely fine raising kids on their own—Sarah Rogers was still Exhibit A—and sure, he was a long way from questioning whether he was doing a worse job than Odin, but still. What if it actually wasn’t fair to them, raising them alone because he couldn’t be bothered to try to make it work with a new partner? Wasn’t it part of his job to try to model healthy relationships for them, too? The way the original versions of themselves had turned out, God knew they were all going to need it.

_ Don’t forget you’ve been single all this time for good reasons, pal,  _ the logical part of his brain reminded him.  _ It wouldn’t exactly be fair to be with someone who’d always take second place to a guy who’s been dead for most of a decade, either. _ But the logical part of his brain wasn’t always the loudest one.

“So,” he said to the kids, a couple hours later, once they’d sat down around the dinner table. “Anything interesting happen at school lately?”

For a fourteen-year-old, even a fourteen-year-old who also happened to be an Asgardian goddess, Hela could be remarkably savvy. She followed the direction of Bucky’s gaze, decided that if anyone was in trouble it wasn’t her, and went back to spooning pasta sauce onto her plate from the meat-free bowl he’d set aside before he added the sausage. Thor had also caught on that someone was in trouble, and he knew exactly who it was, judging from the way he glanced quickly at Loki and looked away. Loki was the only one who didn’t seem bothered. “Not really,” he said, twirling some spaghetti onto his fork. “Someone pushed Tregan off the swings at recess.”

“Yeah? And where were you when this happened?”

“I was over on the bench.”

“And what did you do about it?”

“Nothing. I was over on the bench.”

“So you just sat there,” Bucky said skeptically, “and watched this all go down.”

“Yeah,” said Loki, “because I was over on the bench.”

A thousand different thoughts went through Bucky’s mind in that moment: what he could say about that, what Steve would have said about that, whether it was even worth making the effort now that the moment had clearly passed. What came out of his mouth, though, was, “Do you kids ever wish we had a bigger family?”

Hela dropped her fork. “Are you finally gonna let us get a dog?”

“No! What? I—no! We live on a spaceship, we don’t need a dog. Anyway, we already have the Sacred Reznor.”

_ “We  _ don’t have the Sacred Reznor,  _ you  _ have the Sacred Reznor,” Hela said, “and we love it, but it’s not a dog. Dogs  _ do  _ things, and all the Sacred Reznor does is eat and poop.”

“Well, yeah, valid, but it also doesn’t need to be bathed and trained and it’s never chewed up my slippers. Anyway, I’m not talking about a dog. I’m talking about whether you guys would like to have another parent.”

Thor swallowed a mouthful of spaghetti and said, “Why? You’re our dad. We don’t want to go live with somebody else.”

“Somebody  _ else?”  _ Loki repeated, visibly distraught. “Can you  _ do  _ that? I promised I wouldn’t stab Thor anymore  _ and  _ you already took away my knives!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Kids, slow down,” Bucky said, with a laugh that was mostly relief. “Nobody’s going anywhere. It was a hypothetical question. You know what ‘hypothetical’ means?”

“Yeah, it’s like ‘what if we got a dog,’” said Hela, pointedly. 

“You’re really not letting that go, are you? Look, forget I said anything. Eat your spaghetti,” Bucky said, and for a while, he really believed that was going to be the end of it.


	4. Chapter 4

Bucky had long been in the habit of tucking the boys into bed at their regular bedtime, then telling Hela to put the screens and music away and get into bed at _her_ regular bedtime, before retiring to his own room a little way down the hall, shutting the door, and reading for a while, or corresponding with his Earth friends, or just generally relaxing for an hour or two before he fell asleep. For several years now, he’d been working on the assumption that his super-soldier hearing would alert him if any of the kids didn’t go to sleep like they were supposed to and started prowling around the ship instead. He would have been very surprised, therefore, to discover that while he was making his way through Shuri’s latest meme-laden message from Wakanda, the Odinbrood were in the early stages of plotting a revolution.

“Thor,” Loki whispered, into the darkness of the bedroom they shared. _“Thor._ Are you awake?”

“Mmph,” said Thor, turning over in his bed. “I’m trying to sleep, Loki.”

“You don’t think Dad would really send me away to live with someone else, do you?”

“He said he wouldn’t. Go to _sleep,_ Loki.”

“Only, what if I made him _really_ mad this time?” said Loki. “What if he doesn’t like me anymore?”

Thor, finally seeing his plan to go to sleep for the lost cause it was, pushed the blankets aside and sat up. “You aren’t worried about me not liking you anymore, and I’m the one you _stabbed,”_ he pointed out.

“You thought it was funny.”

“I didn’t think it was funny.”

“Admit it. It was kind of funny.”

Thor rolled his eyes. “You did make a good snake, though.”

“See? You liked that part!”

The door to their room suddenly eased open, and both boys fell silent—Bucky wasn’t especially strict about the no-talking-after-bedtime rule, it was more of a suggestion, but for years now, it had been an unspoken rule of the game that they both lost if they got caught. But it was only Hela, with her hair wet from the shower and her fluffy green bathrobe wrapped over the black tank top and yoga pants that served her as pajamas. With her makeup off, she looked younger than she ever did on a school day. Thor had been made aware, sharply, that Hela was allowed to look any way she wanted to, but he always thought it was reassuring to see her without it. He knew that something bad had happened to her, when he was too young to remember; he knew it still made her sad sometimes, and he felt bad for her. When she let them see her without makeup, it seemed like she felt safe enough to take off her armor.

Something bad had happened to Dad, too, once. He didn’t really talk about it, but sometimes he avoided talking about it in a way that almost let you guess the shape of it, like if you couldn’t see a hole in the ground from where you were standing but you could see how people walked around it. Thor had already decided, although he hadn’t told anybody yet, that when he grew up, he was going to protect people from the bad things that wanted to hurt them. He didn’t know exactly how he was going to do that yet, but he was pretty sure he could figure it out.

“What are you two talking about?” Hela asked, taking a seat on the foot of Loki’s bed.

“Loki’s afraid Dad won’t like him anymore and he’ll send him to live with somebody else,” Thor said.

“Thor! Don’t tell her that.”

“You’re such a dork, Loki,” said Hela. “That’s not what Dad was talking about at all.” She paused dramatically, to give her next words their proper weight, and said, “Dad wants to _date.”_

“Gross!” said Thor. “He’s like a thousand years old.”

“He’s a hundred and eight,” Hela corrected. “Remember the birthday cake Aunt Natasha sent him? And I think he _should_ date somebody. It would be good for him to have someone to take care of him.”

“We can take care of him,” Thor protested.

“We’re kids, dummy. He takes care of us. That’s how it works. And you know he’s sad a lot more often than he should be.”

“He was looking in his box of weird old-people stuff again,” Loki added. “The dust under the bed was all messed up.” They’d first broken into the ammo box when Hela was about eleven and the twins were about five; Loki had figured out how to unlock it and Thor had pried up the lid. None of them had understood the things in it, but they knew that the times when their father looked at it usually coincided with the times when he got all sad and weird and told them to go play quietly for a while. “Do you really think he’d be happier if he was dating? I mean, it sounds like a lot of work.”

“Grownups like weird things, I guess,” said Thor, and neither of the others could argue with that.

“If he’s going to date somebody,” Hela said, “I only want him to have to do it once. Some of my school friends’ parents are always dating different people, and they all seem really stressed out about it. I think we should try to find Dad the right person right away, so he can skip to the happy part.”

“What, like true love’s kiss? Like in those stupid romance novels you keep under _your_ bed?” Loki said, curling his lip in disdain. “The ones with the naked guys turning into werewolves on the covers?”

“First off, those are urban fantasy,” Hela said, with great dignity. She wasn’t going to suffer her birthday gifts from Aunt Natasha to be mocked. “And second, I know how it works when people fall in love. They have to be the right people for each other, not just whoever’s nearby. I mean, think about it. Who could he even know around here who he’d want to go out with?”

The twins looked at each other blankly for a moment, and then both of their mouths fell open in horror. “Not Mx. Zaay,” Thor blurted. “That would be _terrible.”_

“She’d be here _all_ the _time,”_ Loki moaned. “They’d probably even _kiss_ and stuff.”

“You see?” Hela said. “That’s why we should find him the right person, before he picks somebody we don’t like.”

“So how are we supposed to help Dad find a person to be in love with?” Thor asked.

“With magic,” Loki said. “Duh. Everybody else might have to do it the old way, with dating people and everything, but we could cast a spell that would just fix it all for us.”

“Once we figure out who it should be,” Hela said, “we should cast a spell to bring them to us. We don’t want to find out that Dad’s true love is all the way across the galaxy and then have to convince him to go there. With our luck, it’d be someplace where people don’t even eat cheese.”

“I don’t think they’d be the right person for Dad if they didn’t like cheese,” Thor said thoughtfully.

“We should make a list,” Hela said, trying to sound cool and casual, to hide her excitement. Honestly, why hadn’t they ever thought of this before? It would make Dad so much happier. Maybe he’d even finally say yes to getting a dog. Probably not, but a girl could dream. “All the things we want in Dad’s new partner.”

“They should be a good person,” said Thor. “They should want to help other people. And they should like cheese.”

“You’re both so dumb sometimes,” Loki reiterated. “Hela, why don’t we just tell the spell to bring us Dad’s true love? He wouldn’t fall in love with anybody who wasn’t nice to us.”

“Aren’t you the one who was just afraid Dad was gonna send you away?” Thor asked.

“Shut up, Thor.”

“So we need to find Dad’s true love, make sure they’re also nice to us, and bring them here,” Hela mused. “I’ll need some help to cast a spell like that. Loki, your job will be to distract Dad so he doesn’t get too curious about what I’m doing.”

“Oh, please. That’ll be too easy,” said Loki.

“And, Thor, you can help me figure out how to power the spell. It’ll take a lot of energy, to do something this big.”

“Well, we’re in space,” Thor said. “Why don’t we use a star?”

“Thor, you’re _so dumb,”_ Loki groaned.

“No, wait, that could work,” Hela said, growing excited again. “I need to think about this some more. Just keep thinking about it, and whatever you do, don’t tell Dad, okay?”

Both of the twins put up a show about being annoyed that she’d even suggest such a thing, but Hela shushed them, opening the door and vanishing into the hallway. After that, they both got back in bed, but even after the lights were out, there was no possibility that either of them was going to sleep. They all had far too much to think about for that.

Thor hadn’t meant to suggest that they should wish on a star, exactly. He really had been thinking about the energy. Stars _were_ pretty neat, though. They’d just done a unit on them in science class, and Mx. Zaay had told them that stars could be born and die, and that they also had hearts, which had to mean they were alive in some way. He thought that was really interesting, even if no one else did. And he thought the fact that he was interested in a lot of things kind of proved that he wasn’t dumb. Just because he had a hard time sitting still in class, it didn’t mean he didn’t like knowing about things. Dad understood that. Hopefully their new parent would, too.

He wondered what Hela and Loki would have put on their lists, if Loki hadn’t been so quick to shut down the idea of making them. Honestly, Thor thought that Hela was right: Dad was sad a lot, and the most important thing was finding a person who’d make him happier. Still… if he’d had to wish for one thing? Thor might have wished for a parent who looked a little more like him. Just a _tiny_ little smidge more. When they went out to places on Xandar, people looked at Dad and Hela and Loki and had no problem believing all of them were related. Thor felt like he stood out, sometimes, and he wasn’t sure that was always good. He just wanted everybody to be happy, all of them together.

He fell asleep thinking about a new parent who looked like him, and it was all mixed up in his head with the stars.

 

Loki had a secret that nobody knew except for his dad and him, and the secret was this: he wasn’t really Thor’s twin brother. His dad said he could tell the secret if he wanted to, but it was up to him. “But I don’t want you to feel bad about it,” he’d said, when he’d taken Loki out for ice cream, just the two of them. (Ice cream had been Loki’s absolute favorite thing in the universe at the time, and remained in the top five; getting Dad’s full attention was also a front runner.) “Because it doesn’t make you good or bad to be different. It’s just that some people want everybody to be just like them. Have I told you about my friend Steve?”

“The one I’m named after?” said Loki Steven Laufeyson Barnes, who heard his full name quite a bit, actually.

“Yeah, exactly that one. There was this thing when me and Steve were kids, called eugenics, and what it meant was that there were some people who wanted to kill other people because they were different. The two of us went to war to fight against people who thought like that. See, Steve was sick a lot when he was a kid, and those bad people, they thought people like him were less important than everybody else. But I knew they were wrong, because Steve was absolutely the best person I ever knew.” He sighed. “I’m not explaining this real well, and it’s a lot to get your head around, especially when you’re a kid.”

“But people would be scared of me if they knew I was a frost giant?” Loki had said, wide-eyed.

“Not everybody would. _Some_ people might. I know Thor and Hela wouldn’t be, and I’m definitely not. I’m not trying to say you should hide who you are. It’s just that sometimes life can be really complicated and hard, and you don’t always owe it to everybody to tell them your story. I’m telling you this because I want it to be up to you.”

Loki had thought about it, turning it over in his head. “Would you tell people? If it was you?”

“If I was you, I’d wait until I was a lot older,” Dad had told him, in a way that made Loki think he’d already thought about it and decided. “I know it would be their problem if they were afraid of me, not mine. But I also know what it’s like to have people be afraid of me for something that’s not my fault. It’s not an easy thing to live with.”

“Then I’ll wait,” said Loki, and Dad had looked relieved about it. He probably would have been less pleased if he’d known that Loki was already starting to understand the thrill of keeping a secret, but, well, that was how it was.

Loki had a secret, and he also had a suspicion. He’d heard Dad talking to Aunt Shuri once, on one of the rare occasions when he called her long-distance—it took some tinkering to bounce a voice signal between Earth and Knowhere, so they didn’t bother with it often, but when they did, it was usually because one of them had a good story to tell. This time, the story had involved Dad making a delivery to an ice planet and getting into some kind of trouble on the surface. “So if anybody tells you there’s nothing colder than seventy years in cryo, I can personally confirm that they’re a damn liar,” he’d finished, while Aunt Shuri had literally laughed until she cried. But later, when Loki had asked about that word, _cryo,_ Dad had clammed up and done the “I’ll tell you when you’re older” dance that adults always thought they were fooling anybody with. Loki, being the industrious problem-solver that he was, was having none of that, so he’d done a little digging and determined that Dad was talking about being _cryogenically frozen,_ which was a thing that the Earth ’net said almost never worked on ordinary humans.

How very interesting, he’d thought, that a human who evidently could, and had, survived it just happened to have adopted a kid who was a frost giant. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that Dad must be a frost giant too, or even partially one, but that understanding of _cold_ that was woven into his bones… that was a thing he and Dad had in common that the others didn’t, even if Dad didn’t know he knew. It was a thing he didn’t have to share with his siblings, and especially not with Thor, who he loved and everything, but who also seemed to be able to get people to like him without even trying and who never had anybody tell him _he_ was acting too weird and melodramatic on the playground. Still, he thought maybe he wouldn’t mind if there was something about this new parent that was like that, too—some small thing that they could have in common.

Loki snuggled under his blankets, and his dreams were full of ice.

 

For Hela’s first birthday after her new father had—well, benignly kidnapped her, she guessed you might say—her new Uncle Clint from Earth had sent her a toy dog, a soft, floppy stuffed animal which Dad had immediately nicknamed Clint Barkton. The dog had almost been bigger than her, at that point, but now it was just the right size for hugging at night, when all the things her birth father had made her do seemed less distant, and the little voice that whispered to her that the power was still there, if she wanted it, seemed so much louder. (She made sure to put the dog up on the shelf over her bed every morning and not take it down until her door was shut at night, because she was fourteen, but as for the rest of the time, nobody needed to know.)

She’d had a lot of talks with Dad (her new Dad, that was, her _real_ Dad) over the years, about how power wasn’t a thing that was good or bad, just a thing that was. But sometimes it felt like the power _wanted_ to be used, she’d told him, almost shaking at the admission. “And sometimes there might be reasons to use it,” he’d told her, without flinching or looking scared of her or anything. He’d kind of been hinting around, lately, that someday he might take her with him on some of his off-the-books supply runs, the ones where the cheese in the cargo hold was just a cover for something else. Not until she was older, but one day, and maybe then they could figure out some more direct ways for her to help people. She was okay with waiting on that; it did sound scary, even compared to middle school. But she’d figured out one way to help somebody she really cared about right now.

Loki might sneer at the concepts of true love and destiny and other things like that (although she knew that at least some of it was a front, considering he usually had to work even harder than Dad did to not cry at Disney movies). But Hela thought there was something to it. After all, Dad had found her just when she needed him. And he’d helped a lot of other people, too, over the years, she was sure. So why shouldn’t somebody else do the same for Dad, for a change?

She didn’t have a lot of thoughts about what she wanted in Dad’s new partner, as long as they didn’t interfere too much with the good things about the life she and her brothers had now. But she wanted them to care at least as much as Dad did about doing what was right, and that was the thought that went with her as she squeezed Clint Barkton tighter and drifted off to sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

Loki didn’t expect to have too much trouble distracting his father from the fact that Hela was spending a lot of time in the library, or on the galactic ’net, looking for information that would help her create her spell. After all, misdirection was kind of his specialty. A knocked-over breakable thing here, a little mild sassing of some school authority figures there—okay, he overdid it on that last one, since Mx. Zaay had started calling Dad in for conferences at the drop of a hat, but once he figured that out, he corrected for it—and everything went along fine. But when Hela discovered that she was going to need to actually move the ship to get the relative positions of the stars just right, Loki realized that the big moment, the day Hela would need to cast her spell with no distractions, would require something not only big enough to hold Dad’s attention for at least a couple of hours, but also get him off the _Mae West_ altogether.

He needed to give the performance of a lifetime, and he needed to sacrifice his birthday party to do it.

If Loki had thought to ask on the day he found out he wasn’t really Thor’s twin, Bucky probably would have readily admitted he hadn’t been thinking ahead when he filled out their fake birth certificates, part of the cover identity he established for them early on in readiness for eventually enrolling them in school. Since he didn’t actually know any of their birthdays, he’d given Hela his mother’s birth date and the so-called twins his father’s and called it good. It had been years before he realized that making his adopted sons share their big day was a bad idea—specifically, on the day they were both allegedly turning four, when somebody got jealous of somebody and Bucky found himself breaking up a toddler brawl. (Thor still had a scar from one of the bite marks, and each of them still fervently insisted the other had started it.) Afterward, Bucky declared that in the future, each twin would get his own party, one the day before their actual birthday and the other the day after, _and_ they were going to take turns about who went first, with the _Mae’_ s computer keeping track so nobody could bend the rules. (Bucky had enjoyed almost three hours of satisfaction about setting up this foolproof system before somebody pulled somebody’s hair and the fight was back on again, but, as he’d said at the time, that was parenting for you.)

This year was Thor’s turn to go first, and if Loki hadn’t had bigger fish to fry, he would indeed have been feverishly working on ways to upstage his brother, because the morning of Thor’s party, they all woke up to the metallic thump of a small spacefaring drone bumping against the _Mae_ ’s airlock. When Bucky let it in, it deposited a wooden crate, addressed to _Thor Dugan Odinson Barnes,_ on the floor of the loading dock before zooming out again. Bucky gave the crate a shove, testing its weight, and his face changed; “Didn’t think it would be so soon,” he murmured. But he recovered his poise and went and got a crowbar, saying, “Go at it, kiddo, it says it’s for you,” and Thor pried away the boards to reveal a large metal hammer, packed in straw, which he immediately picked up and swung around, testing the weight.

“Whoa, whoa there, buddy, _not_ on the spaceship,” Bucky said firmly, guiding Thor’s hand down until the hammer rested on the floor. “That isn’t a toy, Thor. That’s Mjolnir you’ve got there, and it’s serious business.”

“Mjolnir?” Thor wrinkled his nose. “What’s a Mjolnir?”

“It’s magic,” Hela said, reaching for the handle. She frowned when she couldn’t shift the weight, and tugged harder. “That’s _weird._ It’s like it doesn’t want me to pick it up.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “I think it’s exactly like that.” He followed suit, and wasn’t surprised when it didn’t respond to him, either. “You wanna give it a go, Lokes?”

“Why would I want a hammer?” Loki said scornfully. “I’m not a carpenter.”

“Hey, my uncle Patrick was a carpenter and he worked hard every day of his life, so show some respect. Listen, this is a warhammer, Thor, and I can tell you right now that you’re not going to be fighting anybody with it for a _long_ time. But when you’re older, we can talk about… heck, I don’t know if there’s anybody who gives lessons in this kind of thing, but I gotta assume there must be, especially in a place like Knowhere. So when the time comes, again, when you’re _significantly_ older, I’ll ask around.”

“You let Loki have knives,” Hela observed, in the neutral tone of a sibling who wasn’t invested in the drama and therefore saw no reason not to stir it up. “You even taught him knife tricks.”

“Yeah, well, at the point where I realized I couldn’t keep Loki out of the knives, I figured I might as well teach him how not to lose a finger. You don’t want to end up with one of these,” he said, holding up his metal hand. “Trust me on that. Anyway, Thor, I guess somebody thought it was time for you to have that, so it’s yours. Go put it in your room, okay?”

Thor scampered off, and Bucky watched him go, trying not to let himself get too sentimental over the whole thing. Kids had to grow up sometime; he knew that going in. But _sometime_ had come awfully fast when the kids were his own.

Thor clearly liked the hammer, a _lot,_ but he put it down with no complaints when Bucky told him to get ready for his party, a casual event that mostly consisted of Thor’s friends from the Xandarian equivalents of soccer and softball teams meeting up in a park to eat cake and run around until they were all muddy and tired. And their actual birthday passed quietly enough, as well; the kids played, Bucky worked, and Loki focused on good but not suspiciously good behavior, lulling Bucky into a false sense of security. So Bucky had absolutely no idea what was about to hit him when Loki walked into the kitchen on the day of his party, said, “Dad, I don’t feel so good,” and vomited all over the kitchen floor.

He hadn’t warned either of his siblings about the plan, because he wanted genuine reactions, and he got them: Hela screamed, Thor backed up so fast he knocked over a chair, and there were a few minutes of thoroughly enjoyable chaos while Bucky knelt—carefully—beside Loki and put his right hand on his forehead. “Oh, kiddo, you’re freezing,” he murmured, the frost giant equivalent of _you’re burning up._ “Okay, Thor, Hela, clear out of the kitchen until I can clean this up. Loki, I—” he began, and then stopped, stymied, just like Loki had anticipated. There was no human ailment Bucky didn’t know how to treat, but the couple of times the kids had been sick, between the unfamiliar Xandarian illnesses and their Asgardian and frost giant biologies, he’d had no idea whether human remedies might make things better or worse. And he couldn’t exactly take stolen Asgardian royal children to actual Asgardian doctors.

In the end, he reacted exactly as Loki had hoped: “Stay right there a minute. I’m gonna make a call. I’ll be right back,” he said, settling Loki into a chair, and went off to configure the ship’s computer to send a communication to Earth.

“What did you _eat?”_ asked Thor, who knew his brother too well to believe this was a natural occurrence.

“Seven and three-quarters bananas,” said Loki, who wasn’t going to allow anyone to question his commitment to a role.

“Okay,” Bucky said, coming back into the kitchen and scooping Loki up in his arms. Loki went limp, allowing himself to be carried, which, Hela noted, only served to deepen the worry lines on his forehead. “Kiddo, you and me are gonna take the shuttle and make a real quick jump to Earth. I want Doctor Stephen to take a look at you.”

“Nooo, I hate him,” Loki grumbled weakly.

“He’s not my favorite person either,” Bucky admitted, “and _hopefully_ I’m just being paranoid, but you’ve usually got a stomach like cast iron and I want to make sure this isn’t the beginning of something serious. Hela, could you do your old man a huge favor and call the plasma tag place to cancel our reservation for tonight? And then just keep an eye on your brother for me until we get back? It shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours.”

“Yeah, sure, Dad,” Hela agreed, and Bucky grabbed a blanket from a chair to tuck around Loki’s shoulders and carried him toward the small shuttle he kept docked in the _Mae West_ ’s bay for his shorter flights. He preferred to put the _Mae_ in orbit around whatever planet he was traveling to and beam down to the surface once he was in teleporter range, but Earth was understandably twitchy about unannounced visits from large alien spacecraft these days. “You know how to get ahold of me if you need anything,” he called back, over his metal shoulder, before he disappeared; a few minutes later the _Mae_ ’s lights dimmed, an indication that the shuttle had drawn the power to make its jump.

“Well,” Hela said, once the lights came back up. “He did promise he’d come up with a good distraction.”

“I don’t get why Dad freaks out so much when one of us is sick,” Thor said. “Especially when it’s Loki. It’s almost never real.”

“It’s because Loki is the smallest, that’s all. Anyway, I need to move fast if I’m going to get the spell cast before they get back. Meanwhile,” Hela put her hands on Thor’s shoulders and spun him around, toward the disaster that was the kitchen, “you can clean this mess up so Dad doesn’t have to later.”

“What? It’s gross!”

“Fine. You want Dad’s true love to show up and this is the first thing they see?”

“You know you’re the _actual_ worst, don’t you?” Thor grumbled at her, heading off to find a bucket.

Once both of her brothers were out of her hair, Hela took a deep breath, steeling herself for what she was about to do. Then she took off at a sprint down the corridor, toward the _Mae_ ’s main control room, where she hopped up into the captain’s chair. She’d watched Dad steer the ship before, and she knew what to do. First she had to press _this_ button and press _those_ sensors and, yes, there was the pop and rumble of the engines firing up, deep down in the engine room under her feet. Then she had to unlock the orbital anchor, the thing Dad called the _parking brake,_ which was… that lever there. Now the ship was humming with energy, which meant she could put it in gear and turn _this_ control to move the rudder, then ever so gently slide her fingers down the acceleration bar, firing the thrusters so that the ship would start to turn...

The clang and crunch of the ship’s hull against an obstacle outside, in space, was something Hela had only experienced once before, when a meteorite had struck the _Mae_ ’s shield at exactly the wrong angle and bounced off the hull. It hadn’t done any real harm, but it had startled everyone, even Dad, and Hela had never forgotten the metallic sound of the collision. But the ship’s computer hadn’t warned them about any meteor storms today, so if she’d hit something, it must have been… “Oh, no,” she whispered, right about the time the comm screen lit up and the face of Dad’s friend Rocket filled the screen.

“What the krutacking hell, Barnes,” Rocket started to snarl. Then he saw Hela, and paused. “Oh, hey, kid. Tell your dad to get in here and explain why he just put a dent in my hull, wouldja?”

“He’s not here,” Hela said, too startled to lie. Loki would have had a story ready to go in a snap, but although he and Hela were alike in plenty of other ways, she’d never been great at subtlety. If Rocket told Dad she’d crashed into his ship, not only was Dad going to be furious, he was going to want to know why she’d been moving the _Mae_ in the first place. Well, now there was nothing to do but try the time-honored Barnes family tactic of combining bravado and bullshit. “I just needed to turn the ship around real quick because I—”

“Hey, no problem, I was just gonna mess with your dad a little bit,” Rocket said, and Hela shut her mouth with a snap. “You forgot to turn on the proximity sensor, didn’t you? Little green dial under the secondary thruster?”

“Y-yes,” said Hela.

“Okay, well, you know if you put the ship on auto prep, it’ll run the pre-launch checklist for you. It’s a _lot_ safer that way, right? Anyway, lemme get out of your way so we don’t have to worry about it. View out the front window was gettin’ stupid anyway.” Rocket leaned back on the steering bar, and his smaller ship sped upward and backward, away from the _Mae._ “There, plenty of room, couldn’t hit me now if you tried. Just remember the pre-launch next time. That’s one case where the protocol really is there for a reason.”

“I… I… thanks,” said Hela, whose previous interaction with adults had led her to expect pretty much any reaction but this one.

“No problem. Rocket out. Man, I am _crushing_ this parenting thing,” Hela heard him add smugly, as he cut the signal.

Hela gave herself a moment to take a couple of deep breaths and let her heart rate return to normal. Then she flipped on the proximity alarm, reached for the controls again, and eased the rudder downward and to the right. She heard the hum of the gravitational fields kicking in, correcting for the new orientation, turning the ship so that one of the portholes in the room at the top of the ship, where she’d set up her spell, faced toward the nearest star, and the other faced toward Asgard.

Hela had a fair amount of training in magic, even though a lot of it was as natural for her as breathing. Dad had given her more than one speech over the years about power coming with responsibility, which he always said like he was quoting someone; that was why he’d sent her to spend school breaks and summer vacations with Uncle Wong, who showed her how to take her magic beyond raw instinct and into something formal and focused (and also taught her Beyoncé’s Single Ladies dance) and Aunt Wanda, who knew everything there was to know about force fields (and also introduced her to nail polish and online makeup tutorials). But their magic was definitely human magic, and while most of it translated, there was one thing that didn’t. Wanda and Wong both talked about drawing magic from all the energy around them, but she shut down all her distractions and concentrated, _really_ concentrated, she could feel the pull of a particular place, a particular _source_. In her childhood memories, she was wrapped up in that place’s power like a warm blanket, right up to the day it exploded into something different, something sharp and deadly. Most of the time it was a thing she didn’t even notice, like background music playing in the next room, easy to turn out. But when she reached for it, it snapped into focus, and she could feel the whole cold, heavy weight of it, terrible and wonderful and there for the taking.

Hela had never planned a spell as carefully as this one, not even under Wong’s watchful eye, because there’d never been a spell she wanted so badly to get right. She gathered the strength she needed from Asgard, pulling it around her like armor. She collected the energy to power it from the star. Anyone watching from outside the ship would have seen nothing, unless they had their sensors set to show a very specific kind of energy surge, but Hela could feel it, and she knew how to wrap her hands around it and channel it into a spell that would do exactly what she wanted it to do.

_Find Dad his True Love, the person he’s meant to spend the rest of his life with. Find them no matter how far away they are, and bring them here, to me._

She focused her mind, and she let the spell go.

It rippled through the ship and exploded outward, draining her of all her energy immediately, more than anything she’d ever done before. She cried out as she fell to the floor, her knees scraping the metal— _okay, note to self, wear pants instead of a skirt next time, or at least get some knee pads._ But that only bothered her for a second, because she could _feel_ that the spell had worked. She rolled over on the floor and stared up at the ceiling, triumphant, and she couldn’t wipe the big stupid grin off her face, not even when Thor walked in.

“I felt you do the thing,” he said. “Did it work?”

“Of course it worked. _I_ did it,” Hela said, less sharply than she might have. “It might take a little bit before they show up. It depends on how far away they are, I mean, the spell has to find them first and then it has to bring them here, but it’s gonna work.”

Thor grinned back at her, as cheerful and trusting as the puppy Dad still wouldn’t let her have yet. “It’s gonna be great,” he said, lying down on the floor next to her. Then he glanced at her from the corner of one eye, and added, “This is really important to you, huh?”

Another time, Hela would have been annoyed that he could tell; she’d worked even harder than most teenagers at cultivating an air of surliness about the world. But with Thor, who was an idiot but a _nice_ idiot, she decided she could afford to open up just this once. “You don’t remember our birth father at all, do you?” she asked. When he shook his head, she said, “Dad says he wouldn’t have let us be a family, not really. He says Odin would’ve kept us apart and not even told us about each other. And he says he would’ve made me do awful things, and he would’ve told me that was all I was good for. I don’t know how Dad knows, I think it has to do with the Time Stone, but I know it’s true, because Odin wanted me to do things with magic… it was never nice things, not ever. He said that wasn’t what magic was for. And the kind of magic I can do, it really is a lot easier to do awful things. But this was a good thing. I did a good thing with my magic, just me, and nobody can take that away.”

“You _are_ good,” Thor assured her. “You’re great.”

“I thought I was the worst.”

“I just said that. I didn’t mean it.”

Hela turned her head and let herself smile at him, a full-on real smile. “Well, you’re a big dumb idiot, but I guess you’re kind of okay too,” she said, which was basically _I love you_ in sibling language. And if she hadn’t known Thor had the effortless magic known as Allspeak, just like she did, it would have been confirmed for her when he reached out and squeezed her hand, quickly, before letting go.

They stayed there for a long time, looking out at the stars through the portholes, and it was only after five or ten minutes had passed that Hela started to get concerned. “I thought they’d be here by now,” she said, trying to sound like she was only casually annoyed by Dad’s partner’s tardiness.

“Maybe they’re a really, really, really long way away,” Thor suggested.

“I don’t know. I kind of thought they’d be from Earth, like Dad is, and Earth isn’t that far,” Hela began—but she never got to finish, because just then the lights dimmed again, a sign that the shuttle had jumped back into nearby space and the bay doors were opening to allow it to return to its dock. “C’mon,” she said, and jumped up to run back down to the main living quarters.

By the time Bucky made it back to what he called the family room, Hela was curled up in a chair with a book on her lap and Thor was stretched out on the floor, also pretending to read for all he was worth. Bucky was holding Loki by the hand, and his expression was absolutely steely, the one look he had that all of the Odinbrood knew never to mess with. “Room,” he said to Loki, pointing, “now,” and Loki, cringing, scuttled off toward his bedroom, while Hela and Thor both froze in place, staying as still as possible while Bucky walked away, slowly and deliberately, in the other direction, his steel-toed boots clanging heavily on the metal floor.

Hela glanced at Thor, and a whole conversation passed between them; then Hela glanced at the clock. She gave it five minutes before she got up and followed Bucky, knocking softly, and then easing open the door to his office. “Dad,” she began, and then, alarmed, repeated, _“Dad?”_

Bucky had his head down on the desk, arms folded on top of a pile of ledgers and cheese inventory printouts, and his shoulders were shaking. At the sound of Hela’s voice, he sat up, wiping his eyes. It was only after he turned his face toward Hela that she realized: he was _laughing._ “Dad,” Hela repeated, confused, and Bucky gasped, fought down a round of what could only be described as giggles, and held out his arms to her. “Hey, kiddo.”

“Dad, what’s going on? What’s… Is something wrong? I thought Loki—”

“There is—” Bucky gulped another deep breath, and continued, “—nothing wrong with your brother. He’s fine. Doctor Stephen couldn’t find anything wrong, so he kind of interrogated him a little, and Loki finally admitted that he thought… he thought he _might_ have thrown up because he ate eleven bananas.”

 _It was seven and three-quarters,_ Hela thought, but never in a million years would she have said it. There’d been enough narrow escapes today already. “How is that funny?” she asked.

“The funny part,” Bucky told her, contorting his face under the tremendous effort of not laughing, “is that when I asked him what he was thinking, he thought… that the best answer to give me… was, ‘I was thinking you wouldn’t notice they were gone because you don’t like bananas,’” Bucky finished, and then dissolved into helpless laughter again.

“Well,” Hela said, “you do hate bananas,” and apparently now it _was_ the right thing to say, because Bucky whooped with laughter and then held his arms out to her for a hug.

“I love you kids so much,” he said, squeezing her tight, and for a second, Hela let herself feel small and safe, with his metal arm braced against her back like a shield against the world. “God, half the time I can’t fathom what’s going on in your heads, but you surprise me every damn day and I wouldn’t trade one day with the three of you for all the money in the galaxy.”

“I love you, too, Dad,” Hela said, and she’d never meant it more.

But even there in Bucky’s arms, where she felt the safest she ever had in the world, she couldn’t help wondering. She’d been so sure, _so_ sure that the spell had gone off perfectly, without a hitch, and Dad’s true love had still failed to materialize on the _Mae West._ By the time the second hour had passed, a tiny fear had started to uncurl inside her, and after she went to bed that night, it bloomed into a larger one that almost kept her from falling asleep altogether.

What if the spell had gone off perfectly, but it hadn’t worked because Dad didn’t have a true love for it to find?

And if he did, _where were they?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because two of my beta readers asked me about this: No, there's nothing inherent to bananas that induces vomiting (although there is an urban legend about the incompatibility of bananas and Sprite), but how many bananas do you think YOU could eat before you threw up? I bet it isn't seven and three quarters.


	6. Chapter 6

Almost a decade on from when he quit soldiering for the last time, Bucky Barnes still hadn’t gotten back into the habit of getting a solid eight hours of sleep.

It was only natural, he guessed. Other than a short break of a couple years on a Wakandan goat farm, Bucky had been in and out of firefights, ambushes, night patrols, and assorted other imminent threats pretty much constantly since 1941. Nowadays, even with the peril dialed down to the very occasional skirmish when a smuggling run went awry, and with most of the fights he did get into being the kind where getting off-planet meant he was basically home free, it was no wonder the deep animal part of his brain was still skeptical of the idea that it could _stop._ The nightmares had more or less quit, and the falling-asleep kind of insomnia had followed them into the big black void of space, but sometimes the middle-of-the-night wakefulness was still a thing. And at some point, after literal years of messing with soft lighting and white noise and various kinds of meditation exercises, Bucky had finally worked out that when his brain snapped him awake at fuck o’clock in the morning, there was really nothing to do but get up and give it something to work with.

So he got really, really good at midnight baking.

It was a little crazy, he guessed, but when he thought about the amount of PTSD and literal brain damage he’d started out with and the progress he’d made, he felt like he’d gotten off pretty light, all things considered. And he did have three young and rapidly growing aliens to feed whose constant hunger put even his super-soldier metabolism to shame.

And, hell, it wasn’t bragging to say that he made the best cheese danish in this half of the galaxy.

He was just sliding a tray into the oven, humming along to the recording of Glenn Miller’s “Stardust” that was playing over the _Mae_ ’s sound system, when there was a crash and a clatter behind him. His brain parsed what it was immediately: it was the sound of someone banging into the kitchen cart, making all the baking pans rattle. Three kids in the house—er, ship—and there was no way not to be familiar with every kind of crash and its relative seriousness. What was weird was that whoever it was had been able to sneak up on him; even Loki wasn’t usually that good. All of that went through his head in the time it took him to spin around, raising his left arm to shield himself out of old, old habit, even though it probably looked pretty funny considering it was encased in a bunny-print oven mitt.

Steve Rogers was on the floor of his kitchen.

Bucky froze—pun not intended—and Steve stared at him in wide-eyed shock, and even when ninety-nine percent of his brain had shut down completely, the one percent that was left took a moment to inform Bucky that Steve looked _good._ He was clean-shaven and tanned and well-fed, his hair sun-bleached blonder than it had been for a couple of years before the Infinity War; he was wearing his old bomber jacket over one of those T-shirts so tight, the picture he made bordered on obscene well before Bucky’s eyes slid down the line of his battered blue jeans. He was wearing socks but not shoes. Bucky snapped his head up, meeting Steve’s eyes, and the expression in them was exactly, heartbreakingly the same mix of hope and distrust he remembered from waking up in Bucharest with his arm in a vise.

Bucky’s body lunged before his brain caught up, metal fingers closing around Steve’s throat, oven mitt and all, and slamming him against the stainless steel door of the refrigeration unit. “Prove to me you’re not a Skrull,” he growled, and he could hear the—panic? Hope? Something, anyway, rising in his voice, turning it into an unrecognizable rasp. “Fucking _prove_ it!”

“Bucky,” the thing that looked like Steve said, and Bucky’s grip wasn’t that tight; an imposter’s voice shouldn’t have sounded that choked. “Bucky, you’re _dead.”_

“You’re fucking dead and I don’t have time for this shit. I will _kill_ you if you don’t show me who you really are, you come in here trying to convince me you’re Steve, you better be ready to  _prove—”_

“I’m with you till the end of the line, pal,” Steve said softly, and his eyes were shining with tears.

Skrulls could only sync recent memories, and unless somebody else had told—but there was nobody—and anyway, a Skrull might be able to copy Steve down to the super-enhanced DNA, but he couldn’t seriously believe it could replicate _that_ look, _that_ exactly. Bucky let go. “Your mom’s name was Sarah,” he began, figuring he owed Steve the same courtesy, but Steve was already shaking his head.

“Bucky,” he said, setting his hands on Bucky’s shoulders. _“Bucky._ I know it’s you, I can _feel_ it’s you, but how? You died in the Infinity War, you died saving my life, so how… Am I dead? Is this heaven?”

A laugh that was mostly hysteria bubbled out of Bucky before he could stop it. “Well, we’re in _the_ heavens, I guess you could say,” he said, backing up a step to look at Steve again. “As for the how, I don’t—wait, fuck, did you say I died in the—no, you’re the one who died, Steve. I was _there.”_

“You jumped in front of me,” Steve said, and oh, there it was, the jaw clench, the stubbornness, the _I know what I saw_ that had saved Bucky’s life on more than one occasion and that stamped this person as his Steve more clearly than anything else had yet. “You pushed me out of the way at the last second and you saved my life, Buck. They put up a monument to you. The whole planet knew you were a hero.”

Bucky shook his head. “Timestream collisions,” he said, feeling dazed. “It has to be. I was running, I was _going_ to take your place, but I was just a second too late, so you were the one who…”

He turned his head as the door that separated the galley from the living quarters, which he always shut before he started a nighttime baking marathon so he wouldn’t wake the kids, creaked open, revealing three wide pairs of eyes in the hallway. “Kids,” he said, almost relieved to be looking at something that met his admittedly whacked-out definition of normal. “This… this is my friend Steve. He just got in and he’s, uh, he’s gonna stay with us for a while.”

“Kids,” Steve mouthed silently, with a look of even greater shock. Bucky ignored it.

“Steve like the Steve I’m named after?” Loki said, somehow making his eyes go even wider.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “uh, yeah, exactly like that Steve. Go back to bed now, and you can all get to know him in the morning, okay?” There was a momentary pause, when he could see the wheels turning in all three of their heads, before he said, _“Now,”_ in the Dad Voice, and they scattered. He shut the door again, leaned against it, and slid down to the floor, his knees suddenly weak. “Steve,” he said again, just to feel the word on his lips another time, and then, looking at him, “Steve, what’s wrong?”

“Of course,” Steve said, in such a carefully neutral voice that Bucky, who knew him better than anybody else ever had or ever would, could practically taste the pain hanging in the air. “You’re with someone. I… I should go.”

“Steve, you fucking dumbass,” Bucky said, startled into a little more candidness than he probably should have allowed himself after ten years. “First off, there’s nowhere _to_ go. We’re in space, you moron. Second, they’re not my biological kids, Jesus. That was the Odinbrood you were looking at there.”

“The Od—what?”

“Thor, Loki, and Hela. I… I did a thing with the Time Stone, after you died. Couldn’t get you back, not that I didn’t want to, but Strange said the whole paradox thing would definitely kick in if I messed with something that integral to my own past. I kidnapped the Asgardian royal heirs instead, so I could give them all happier childhoods than Odin would’ve. There, if you’re really some space merc looking to bring me in and not Steve Rogers, you got my confession.”

“Space merc,” Steve repeated, mouth twitching. He’d recovered enough for a flash of his old dark humor. “I think we better take this one from the top, Buck. What exactly did you do after the Infinity War ended?”

“Thor gave me the Time Stone and a spaceship, I took it back in time, kidnapped his younger self and his siblings, brought them back forwards in time to when I started, and now I’m raising them on a spaceship orbiting around the head of an ancient dead celestial being and baking cheese danishes,” Bucky said. “What’d you do after the Infinity War ended?”

“None of that,” said Steve, with a grimace. “In my—are we really going with a ‘parallel realities’ theory here?”

“Until we have something better to work with, yes. Answer the question, Steve.”

“Okay. In my reality, after the Infinity War, Thor gave _me_ the Time Stone and a spaceship, and Tony and I took it out into space and dropped it into the heart of a star that was going supernova, to make sure it could never be used for evil again. That’s what you did too, right?”

“Um,” said Bucky, whose Infinity Stone was in his sock drawer.

“So, did you feel like going back to the part where you kidnapped the god of thunder, the god of mischief, and—I assume the third one, what did you call her—”

“Hela. The goddess of death, for your ignorant brain’s information. And I thought you said there was only one God and He didn’t dress like that.”

 _“For the sake of argument,”_ Steve said, shooting Bucky a painfully familiar aggrieved look. “Goddess of death, huh? Of course she is.”

“She was. I think she’s something different now.” Bucky looked across the room at him, all of his questions and answers abruptly exhausted. “Steve,” he said.

He never knew which one of them moved first, but when they met in the middle of the kitchen, their mouths locked onto each other with all the familiarity of God knew how many years of love and longing. How had he forgotten how good Steve tasted? He could feel all the muscles in Steve’s body pressed up against his, his skin hot through the flimsy layers of fabric that separated them. Shit, he could feel his dick hardening against Steve’s crotch, and Steve was sliding his hands under his patterned pajama top, which he was going to have to be embarrassed about later, but now it felt like the only reasonable thing to do was to get it off of his—

“Wait,” Bucky gasped, “wait, Steve, _stop,”_ and Steve, displaying truly remarkable willpower, did, actually taking a step back from him. Even though he’d been the one who said it, Bucky couldn’t manage to stifle a sound of dismay as he felt the cool recycled air of the spaceship flood the space between their bodies.

“What is it, Buck?”

“Oh, God, I really, really want this,” Bucky groaned, “and the minute my kids are off this ship, I’m gonna bang you like a screen door in a hurricane, but—”

“Kids. God, your kids. Yeah, we… I’m gonna go ahead and assume kids you’ve been raising are as curious and persistent as you were and there’s nowhere we can go that they wouldn’t be able to accidentally-on-purpose stumble onto us.” Steve turned away with his own barely stifled moan. “I’m gonna need something colder than a cold shower. You got a cryotube on this ship?”

“Too soon, Steve.”

“I’m sor—”

“I’m _fucking_ with you, Steve. But yeah. Urrgh.” Thinking about baseball was going to be painfully inadequate in this situation. “Gimme a second, and then I’ll show you where you can sleep. Wait—where were you when… whatever happened, happened?”

“I was on vacation.”

“Vacation?” Bucky repeated, his voice dripping with skepticism.

“Yes, vacation. I take vacations,” said Steve, in the tone of a person who had this argument a lot. “When I had to come back to Earth and you weren’t on it, the only thing that kept me from lying down in a ditch to die was that Natasha had taken over revamping S.H.I.E.L.D., and she talked me into coming back. I promised her six months. I ended up staying for eight years.”

“Hang on. Natasha batted her eyelashes at you and you went back to S.H.I.E.L.D. after you literally destroyed it the first time? Wow, Steve, you’re even dumber than I thought you were.”

“It’s complicated,” Steve said.

“Sure. So you worked there for eight years—”

“And then Natasha told me I was fired if I didn’t take a vacation. So I got on my bike and started driving out west. I thought—” Steve paused and looked down for a moment, and when he looked up again, he was doing the ‘Feelings? What are feelings?’ face that had never fooled Bucky for a second. “Thought I’d finally go on that trip we always talked about. You know. Go see the Grand Canyon. New York to Arizona—all the highways they built after our War, you can do it in less than two days now if you don’t need a lot of sleep.”

Bucky swallowed hard. Yeah, he remembered how they’d talked about that. “Did you make it?”

“No. Earlier tonight, I was camping in the Petrified Forest. Natasha texted me a bad joke about fossils right before I fell asleep. Then I woke up,” he waved his hand around the kitchen, “here. Space, huh?”

“Space,” Bucky agreed. “So there’s nowhere you desperately need to get back to, then? No world-saving stuff you gotta get home to do?”

“Nothing,” Steve said, spreading his hands wide. “I’m all yours.”

Bucky’s breath caught again. “Well,” he said, trying to sound calm, “after all that time, I’m sorry you didn’t get to see the Grand Canyon before our universes collapsed into each other or whatever the hell happened here tonight.”

“That’s okay,” Steve said, and it was a good thing Bucky had a super-soldier’s heart after all, because otherwise it would have stopped from an overload of joy when Steve looked him straight in the eye and said, “I’m looking at something better.”


	7. Chapter 7

Hela didn’t get much sleep the night Steve appeared, between being too nervous to fall asleep, then being woken up in the night, and then being too excited to go back to sleep afterward. But she was still walking on air (figuratively speaking, she didn’t _actually_ waste her magic on things like that) when she got up in the morning—and her disappointment was immediate and devastating when she found Steve up and folding blankets in the living room, very obviously taking apart the bed Bucky had made up for him on the couch.

“Good morning,” he said, turning his smile on her, and Hela’s eyes widened. He had the same open, guileless smile as Thor, although, in her opinion, he managed to look considerably less stupid when he did it. “It’s Hela, right? Sorry about waking you up last night.”

Hela forced a quick smile back, but her mind was racing. The couch? The _couch?_ This was horrible! And then, as if he’d sensed her dismay, Bucky opened the door of his bedroom, came out, and smiled softly at both of them. He clearly hadn’t slept much more than Hela, the circles under his eyes as dark as Rocket’s, and his hair was a wreck. It made her cringe, how little he cared about looking like that in front of the man who was supposed to be his soulmate. “Morning, Hela. Morning, sw—Steve, did you sleep okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, the couch was fine, Buck,” Steve said, his voice stiff and disjointed.

“I’ll make up the guestroom for tonight. And, uh, I can loan you a change of clothes and whatever else you need.”

“Great,” Steve said, “that would be great,” and Hela found her eyes shifting back and forth between them like a cat watching a tennis match. This was even worse than she’d feared.

Thor and Loki stumbled out not long afterward, and Bucky dished up scrambled eggs for Steve and the twins, cereal for Hela, and a severely burned but still vaguely edible cheese danish for anybody who was willing to scrape off the charred edges. Steve tried a few icebreakers, asking what the kids were studying in school, and Loki and Hela replied with stilted monosyllables; Thor was the only one who didn’t seem to notice how awkward the whole situation was and questioned Steve about Earth until Bucky said, “Okay, school time,” and handed them their lunches with less editorializing than usual. Hela slipped into the teleporter first, and after the flash of green light zapped her down to the MagLev station on Xandar, where the local kids were pouring out of their transports, she waited on the platform instead of taking off for the middle school immediately, like she usually did, to avoid any unnecessary contact with her annoying and embarrassing siblings. When they popped through the teleporter, one after the other, she was waiting to grab each twin by an arm and haul them off to the side.

“This is a disaster,” she hissed at them, brushing a lock of black hair out of her face so it wouldn’t impede the force of her glare.

“What do you mean?” Thor said, perplexed. “I like Steve.”

“No, dummy! Dad’s soulmate was somebody he already knew, and now they think they’re just _friends_ and they don’t know they’re supposed to be in love with each other.”

“Then we’ll tell—”

“No,” Loki interrupted immediately. “I don’t need Dad to find out I did the banana thing on purpose. I’m already grounded forever. I’m not getting in any more trouble over this.”

“Besides, if you tell people they’re in love with each other, they don’t believe you and then they try to prove you wrong,” said Hela, who had read a tremendous number of novels that dealt with this subject. “You have to put them together and let them see it for themselves. And they’re obviously not gonna figure it out without help.”

“So how do we help them without letting them know we’re helping them?” asked Thor, who did have an admirable capacity for switching gears.

“I don’t know. We need plans. We need lots of plans. The first thing is, we have to keep Steve here and make sure he and Dad spend all kinds of time together. It might take a while. Steve does seem nice and everything, but I don’t think he’s very bright.”

Loki glanced at Thor, then gave Hela a look that spoke volumes about what he thought of his brother’s capacity for plotting off the cuff, and Hela sighed. “Fine, just go to school for now,” she said. “But think about it. We’ll get together and figure something out soon. It was going so well until now, and I can’t believe we still have so much work left to do.”

 

“Bucky,” Steve murmured, with his head on Bucky’s chest, closing his eyes while Bucky pulled a blanket over top of the two of them. “Oh, Buck, I can’t believe how much I’ve missed you. Let’s stay right here and keep doing this for the rest of our lives.”

“Well, the good news is, it’s gonna be a while until I can move again, so I’m definitely staying here for a while. The bad news is, I’m not gonna be doing _that_ again for a couple hours, at least.”

“I’m pretty sure I could do this all day,” Steve told him, laughing a little. “God bless super serum-enhanced refractory periods.”

“Ooh, talk dirty to me,” Bucky said, which earned him a halfhearted swat on his metal shoulder. “Seriously, though,” he said, shifting enough to reach for a pillow and put it behind his head, so he could keep looking at Steve without having to do anything as exhausting as sitting up, “we’ve really gotta get better at keeping our shit together in front of the kids. Sexual tension still goes over the twins’ heads most of the time, but Hela’s getting old enough that she might figure it out.”

“I’m not sure I understand why you don’t want to tell them,” Steve began.

“Because they’re children, Rogers. You can’t just dump a new situation on them and expect them to adjust overnight. And I’m not exactly raising low-risk kids here. Hela already has more trauma than any kid should have to deal with—she was barely six when I took her, she’s fourteen now, and she still has nightmares. I think Odin really broke her in the original version of her life, pushed her to the point where she could only cope by being proud of how good she was at a job nobody should ever be asked to do. I used to have a little of that going on myself, you know, and I started as an adult, but my semi-stable hundred-and-eight-year-old ass still has a hard time processing it. And Thor seems to be turning out okay, maybe he would’ve been the same no matter who raised him, but Loki is… Let’s just say he’s his own thing. I can just about handle it on a good day, but you don’t want to see what it looks like when he starts acting out.”

“He does seem like kind of a lot,” Steve said, in a carefully nonjudgmental tone that made Bucky grin and snuggle even tighter against him.

“Yeah. You know what I’m really not looking forward to? Giving him the sex talk. I mean, we’ve had the basic ‘where do babies come from’ discussion and everything, but what am I supposed to say when he’s a teenager and the questions start getting more specific? ‘Look, son, I know you’re a pansexual shapeshifter and I want to support you no matter who you love, so I’m gonna tell you what you need to know if you’re gonna do it as a guy, and here’s your Aunt Natasha to talk to you about doing it as a woman, and here’s my friend Linda, who’s a large animal veterinarian, in case you decide you want to do it as a magical horse.”

Steve’s whole body shook with laughter as he processed that. “You really don’t shy away from a challenge, do you, Bucky Barnes?”

“If I did, I never would’ve fallen for you, pal. But you get what I’m saying, right?” Bucky said, forcing himself to be serious for a minute. “These kids have been my whole life for the better part of eight years. They’ve never even seen me date anyone else. And they don’t know the whole story about me, much less us. So, having you just show up and become a permanent fixture in their lives right away? That could be really confusing to them. Not to mention, this whole situation—I mean, you’re here and that’s a fucking miracle, I have no idea how it happened and I’m still afraid to take my eyes off you in case the universe decides it made a mistake and wants to take it back, but even so, I’m not gonna magically leave behind all my own problems overnight. So I’m in a position where I either have to explain a lot of stuff from my past that I’m still coming to terms with myself, or I have to let them think you’re some guy who ghosted on me years ago and then walked back into my life and shacked up with me again, which really isn’t an example I want to set. I think it’s better if we ease them into it, you know? Let them get used to having you around before we tell them we’re,” he waved his hand vaguely at the bed, “this. I want them to see it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

“You know,” Steve said, “you may be onto something, Buck. Don’t get me wrong, I love you, and I’m ready to meet you where you are. But the kids… I have to admit, it threw me in a way I’ll be coming to terms with for a while myself. It’s always been this distant-future thing for me. ‘Maybe after things are stable, _if_ there’s ever a time when things are stable, maybe then I’ll have time to think about whether I even want kids.’ You know?”

“The kids are my responsibility,” Bucky said. “I mean, to some extent, we’re a package deal, the four of us—you can’t be in my life and not have a relationship with them at all. But we can figure out a level you’re comfortable with. Believe me, I know that full-time parenting isn’t something you want to take on lightly, and us being together doesn’t mean you have to magically transform into a soccer dad.”

“No, I really would like to do this with you, if you’ll have me,” Steve said, earning a snort from Bucky at the last part. “It’s just, seeing you with them, I think I have a lot of catching up to do.” Then he shot that beautiful golden-boy grin at Bucky again, and said, “How about it, Sergeant? You willing to wait for this rookie to learn the skills he needs to help you with this mission?”

“It’ll be the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done,” Bucky warned him, only half joking.

“Yeah,” Steve said, sliding his hand down Bucky’s chest. “But if we can do it together, it’s more than worth it.” He paused. “I do have one question, though.”

“Yeah?”

“What’s with the aardvark?” Steve asked, and Bucky laughed so long and so hard that the Sacred Reznor actually shuffled out of its crate and stuck its head through the bedroom doorway, to see what all the fuss was about—and to suggest, by means of a deeply tragic expression, that while it was there, perhaps the humans would like to take a moment out of their revelry and consider feeding it before it quietly starved to death. But it was okay. Bucky had more or less decided that it was time to get up anyway.

“Kids’ll be home soon,” he said, rolling over and pulling the sheet around his waist. “We could both use a shower—separately, Rogers, I can see your dirty mind getting ideas over there—and then I’ll train you in the secret art of making peanut butter sandwiches in triangles with the crusts cut off.”

“Well,” said Steve, “you are pretty good with a knife.”

Unfortunately, Bucky only had one thing to throw at Steve, and that was the bedsheet. Fortunately, that had pretty much been Steve’s plan anyway.

 

Hela had planned for Operation Make Dad and Steve Fall in Love With Each Other (final codename TBD; Thor was pushing for “Snake,” but no one else was a fan of it) to start immediately after school, when she was going to figure out how to get Steve alone and start telling him all about how great her dad was. But when she got there, she found that Thor had already managed to mess it up. She followed the sound of laughing and the hard _smack_ of leather against leather to the long, broad hallway that ran down the middle of the ship, separating the living quarters from the refrigerated rooms that were mostly used for storing blocks of cheese between Dad’s supply runs, and found Thor and Steve standing several yards apart, Thor throwing a small white ball and Steve catching it in a thick leather gauntlet. When she cleared her throat, loudly, Thor didn’t even have the grace to look sorry. “Hela!” he called. “Come see! Steve’s teaching me an Earth game called baseball!”

“You want to join us, Hela?” Steve said, turning toward her. “We’re just warming up now, but I think there’s enough room in here that we could try some batting practice.”

“Where’s my dad?” Hela asked, making her voice not cold exactly, but cool enough to let them both know she didn’t think much of their shenanigans.

“He’s in the living room, helping Loki with his homework,” Steve said, and Hela flipped her hair out of her face and went to see if _one_ of her brothers, at least, was capable of staying on task for five minutes.

He wasn’t. He was muttering over a sheet of math problems while their father washed dishes at the sink, and Hela rolled her eyes when she saw that neither of them had made any effort to convert her father into something more presentable than his usual disaster self. “Do you have tomato sauce on you?” she demanded, poking a finger at Bucky’s chest.

“Hi to you, too, Hela,” Bucky said cheerfully, “and probably. We’re having lasagna, and yes, I did make you your own pan with the vegan cheese stuff, and if that doesn’t prove that I love you kids and respect your life choices, I don’t know what would.”

Hela actually ground her teeth, and considering that she had the two actual worst younger brothers in the quadrant, if not the whole galaxy, it was saying something that she’d been pushed to this point of frustration. “Dad. You’re so _embarrassing._ We have _company._ Can’t you at least make an effort?”

Bucky started to make a glib reply, until he looked up and met her eyes. “You think I should get dressed up for dinner with Steve?” he said, trying to keep the amusement out of his voice. “Okay, I’ve got a minute. Let’s go pick something out in my closet.”

“You’re letting me pick?”

“Sure, why not? Of all the Barneses, I’d say you’re the most fashion-forward. So what do you think Steve should see me in?”

Hela pretended to consider it. Bucky lived in jeans, soft layered shirts, and sneakers at home, but he had a closet full of clothes he wore when he visited other planets, so he’d blend in, and most of them were so much better than Earth clothes. “Here,” she said, pulling a dark jacket off the closet rod and handing it to him.

“The Kree outfit?” he said, with a faint laugh. It was heavily inspired by the Kree military’s strike force uniforms, black with teal trim and a silver star on the chest. “I look like I’m playing dress-up as your Aunt Carol when I wear that.”

“Good. Aunt Carol has better taste than you.”

“Okay, _ow_ _,”_ Bucky said, sliding the jacket on. “Jeez, I always forget how tight this thing is.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

“I know. And in retrospect, I don’t know why I expected you to pick something that wasn’t black and uncomfortable.” Bucky yanked on the zipper, then paused to consider himself in the mirror. “Does look pretty good on me, though.”

“That’s why you need me,” Hela said archly.

Bucky laughed, then hesitated, then sat down on the bed and patted the spot beside him. “Hey, c’mere a minute,” he said, and she did, sitting on his right side so he could pull her in for a hug. “I want to talk to you about something. And before you ask, no, we’re still not getting a dog.”

Hela fought down a spike of anxiety, wondering if he’d noticed the fresh dent in the hull, but she kept her voice steady as she said, “What is it?”

“It’s about my friend Steve. He’s gonna stay with us for a while. Is that okay with you?”

“How long?”

“Maybe a long time. He doesn’t have anyplace else he has to be, and him and me, we have a lot of catching up to do. And I know this is sudden, and I wish I’d been able to give you a little more warning, because I know it’ll be a big change to have a stranger living here. But I want you to know one thing won’t change, and that’s that you and your brothers are always gonna be my first priority. Okay?”

“Always? I mean, eventually we’ll grow up and move out and you’ll probably want to have your own life, Dad.”

“Nope. You always come first and nothing’s going to change that,” Bucky said firmly. “And you can always talk to me about whatever. Even if you think I’m gonna think it’s silly or dumb or something, I want you to talk to me instead of sitting around worrying about it, okay?”

With her feelings caught somewhere between pleased that at least Steve was staying for the time being and disappointed that her father still wasn’t seeing the big picture, Hela said, “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

“Okay.” Bucky squeezed her shoulders. “Hey, it’s been like ninety seconds since I’ve seen Loki, which means he’s probably causing trouble. Think you could go check on him for me and make sure nothing’s on fire?”

“Sure,” Hela said, and got up to go back to the kitchen.

Bucky stayed behind for a minute, standing up and walking over to the mirror. Okay, Hela had a point; the jacket was kind of a great look on him. He was running a comb through his hair when he heard a soft “Wow” from the doorway, turned, and found Steve watching him.

“Oh, hey,” he said, affecting casualness. Before the War, Steve used to make fun of him about the effort he put into his clothes and his hair; Steve had never caught on that most of it had been an almost hopeless effort to get Steve himself to notice him as something other than a friend, and Bucky had never caught on that Steve liked him so much better with sleep in his eyes and hair in his face and, yeah, probably with tomato sauce on his shirt. All of that had come later. Still, the way Steve was looking at him now was pretty damn gratifying. “Hela told me that her ancient slob of a dad was embarrassing her and I should put on some nice clothes since we had company.”

“Smart kid,” Steve said, in the tone he reserved for massive understatements, and Bucky grinned at him. “You talk to her?”

“Yeah. Told her you’re staying a while. I’m not real sure how she took it, to be honest. Sometimes it’s so damn hard to tell what that kid is thinking.”

“Well, the more time I spend around the kids, the more time I think you were right to want to take it slow. They’re a little protective of you, you know. Thor spent the whole time we were playing catch telling me about how great you are.”

“Aw, really? You know, sometimes I feel like I’m actually doing okay at this parenting thing.”

“Don’t get cocky. Loki told me that you’re pretty hopeless in general, but you’re worth keeping around because you’re good at grilled cheese sandwiches.”

“Well, he’s not wrong. I do make very good grilled cheese sandwiches.” Bucky glanced through the doorway, making sure none of the Odinbrood had sneaked back to catch them, then leaned over to plant a quick kiss on Steve’s cheek, grinning when he flushed bright red. Honestly, Steve and his thing about PDAs might have been almost as good a reason to ease into the new situation as the kids’ reactions. “We better get back out there before they get suspicious.”

“Yeah,” Steve said faintly. “Just do me one favor, huh?”

“Sure thing. What is it?”

“Keep the outfit,” Steve said, and Bucky laughed all the way to the kitchen.


	8. Chapter 8

Steve had been on the _Mae West_ for five days before Shuri sent Bucky a message informing him that if he didn’t provide an excellent excuse for his radio silence, she was going to send Hela an entire litter of Basenji puppies; so, after a quick consultation, Steve agreed that the only reasonable course of action was to tell her what was going on. Her reaction was exactly what he’d feared. “So if you don’t go visit her in her lab immediately,” Bucky told him glumly, after her message came through, “then in addition to the puppies, she says the twins are getting bagpipes and a drum set.”

“She thinks I’m one of those shapeshifting aliens, doesn’t she,” Steve said, resigned to his fate. Even with most of a galaxy between them, if Shuri had set her mind on seeing him, there was very little he could do to prevent it.

“Well, what she said was that if you are from a parallel universe, she thinks she might know how to prove it, and she has to see you right away before the energy signature disintegrates. But probably she wants to make sure you’re not a Skrull, yeah.”

“You know, one thing I really haven’t missed is how much I used to get poked and prodded in the name of science.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “but remember, nobody but me has seen you in this universe for _nine years,_ Steve.”

Steve blinked. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Sam. And Natasha, Clint, Wanda—”

“And Tony, yeah, you can say it. You might as well just give in to the inevitable and do the whole USO tour. At least that way you get all the hugging and crying over with at once.”

Which was basically Steve’s personal version of hell, but it was also the right thing to do for the friends who’d mourned his death—just like it had been the right thing to go and see Peggy, once, no matter how hard it had been. “You’ll come with me?”

“What? No, Steve, I have work and the kids have school. I’ve already put off too much stuff I needed to get done days ago because I was afraid you’d disappear if I turned my back. At least if you’re with Shuri, I don’t have to worry that your home dimension is going to open up and pull you back in again.”

“What, you think Shuri can stop it if it tries?”

“What, you don’t? Look, Steve, it’s killing me to think about sending you away when I just got you back, but both of us are gonna have to let the other one out of our sight sometime. And you do kind of desperately need an Earth supply run. You know, shoes, a toothbrush, a couple changes of socks and underwear.”

Steve wasn’t in a position to argue with that. “So Wakanda, and then New York, I guess,” he agreed. “How do I get there?”

“I’ll give you a crash course in piloting the shuttle. Honestly, it’s so easy the Sacred Reznor could fly it, so you have a fair chance of not getting stuck on the complete wrong side of the universe.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Steve said, but it was a sound plan, so he said his goodbyes to the kids—Hela, in particular, lobbied incredibly hard to be allowed to go along; “She really loves her Aunt Natasha,” Bucky said apologetically—and got into the shuttle.

Earth was every bit as bad as he’d expected. Shuri did lock him in a lab for half a day and take enough blood samples to leave his arms sore, not to mention energy scans that involved sticking him inside something that looked like an MRI machine and yelling at him for moving when he breathed, but at least she didn’t ask him to prove he wasn’t a Skrull before they could get down to business. She was the only one who didn’t. Every other friend he saw, most of whom he remembered speaking to no more than a few weeks back, demanded that he trot out memories of personal conversations or inside jokes from nine years ago—and when he did, most of them still seemed skeptical, inventing ways he might have gotten the information that made him wonder why they’d bothered asking in the first place. (Natasha finally admitted that for her, the test wasn’t about his memories at all; it was about seeing exactly how long he put up with her interrogation before he went on the offensive. There was a reason the Natasha in his reality was in charge of S.H.I.E.L.D.) And Tony was the worst, not because at first he didn’t believe it, but because Steve had to watch him break when he finally did. The Tony from Steve’s world had been forged into tempered steel by the Infinity War, but this Tony was distressingly brittle. Steve believed Rhodes’ assurances that Tony’s meltdown was the start of a much-needed healing process, but he was also self-aware enough to admit that he was desperately uncomfortable about witnessing it. By the end of the week, the shuttle couldn’t zip him back to the _Mae West_ fast enough.

He arrived to a scene of chaos. Thor, Loki, and—was it Groot? It was; it was a tiny version of Groot, who he’d last seen as a six-foot-tall walking tree and who now looked like an infant version of himself—were chasing each other through the ship, hollering about God knew what, while Rocket lounged in an easy chair, tinkering with some unrecognizable piece of machinery and occasionally shouting a casual “Slow down!” in their general direction. “Hey, Rogers,” he said, “Barnes is in his office,” so that was where Steve went, tapping on the door, then stepping through and closing it behind him.

“Buck?” he said, expecting a little sass followed by a furtive kiss and maybe some playful groping. He didn’t expect Bucky to leap up and grab onto him like a liferaft. “I have had the _shittiest_ week,” he said, leaning enough of his weight against Steve to knock him back against the bulkhead.

“Oh, no,” Steve said, startled. “What happened?”

“What hasn’t happened?” Bucky said, with a humorless laugh. “From the minute you left, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Hela’s refusing to speak to me for some reason, and I need to get it out of her, but I haven’t had _time,_ because I had this disaster at work—the _idiot_ who’s in charge of cheese storage on Contraxia let a refrigeration unit fail and ruined six months of inventory, which would actually be fine because they want to pay me for more, but I can’t take it to Contraxia myself because of this regulation that says everything has to go through their preferred shipper, and I swear they can’t find their asses with both hands over there. And the same day the Contraxia thing blew up, Loki got suspended for fighting at school, and now they’re threatening to expel him. _Expel_ him! I mean, no, I don’t want nine-year-olds punching each other in the face either, but it’s not like he stabbed anyone this time. And on top of _that,_ Thor’s had a cold all week and now I think I’m coming down with it. It’s just a bunch of stupid bullshit and I didn’t want to bother you with it, but it really made me think about how much I hated not having you around and how I never want to go back to that again.” He pulled back far enough to look Steve in the face, cupping his cheek with his metal hand, and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to vent all that on you. How was Earth?”

“Earth was fine,” said Steve. It wasn’t a lie; it was the people on Earth who’d been hard to deal with, not the planet. “Wait, go back a minute. You’re getting sick? Is that even possible?”

“Yeah, you’d think between Asgardian and super-soldier biologies, nothing could get to us, but you’d be reckoning without the actual greatest superpower in the universe, which is the germ-incubating properties of small children,” Bucky said resignedly. “Anyway, a stupid cold is the least of my worries. Did you hear the part about Loki getting suspended? I swear, this school—”

“It’s not the least of my worries,” Steve said, reaching out to touch Bucky’s forehead. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

Bucky looked at him like he’d completely lost his mind, which was a look Steve should have been used to on Bucky by now. And yet, somehow, it kept hitting him again every time how much of a miracle it was that Bucky was even there to think he was an idiot. Even if Bucky did always immediately say something like, “Oh, that’s rich coming from you, Mister ‘I don’t have pneumonia, I’d definitely know if this was pneumonia.’”

“One time!”

 _“Eight_ times. And the answer to your question is, because I have kids to take care of, you lunatic. I mean, yeah, Rocket’s allegedly watching them at the moment, but he’s taking off soon, and anyway, I don’t trust him to do any more than laugh and _maybe_ come get me if one of them starts bleeding.”

“I’ll take over, then,” Steve said. “There are parks on Xandar, right? Do you want me to take them down to the planet for the day and get them out of your hair?”

Bucky looked dumbstruck. “You’d do that?”

“Yeah, sure. Why are you looking at me like that? I mean, unless you don’t want me to—”

“A day without the kids,” Bucky said, in a voice full of wonder. “An entire day without somebody yelling for me every five minutes.”

“Yeah. Don’t you have that ordinarily?”

“I could take a bath,” said Bucky.

“Sure, I guess.”

“I could watch an R-rated movie.”

“If you want to.”

“I could _sleeeeep.”_

“Okay, okay,” Steve said, laughing. “I get it. This actually works out pretty well; you need a break and I’ve been waiting for a chance to get to know the kids better. We can pack a picnic lunch, make a day of it. I’ll even pick up dinner on the way back, so you don’t have to cook.”

“If you do all that, I’ll write to the Vatican and recommend you for sainthood,” said Bucky. “Are you sure you can—you know what? No. I’m not gonna ask, because you’ll say something like, ‘How hard can it be?’ and the next thing I know, the planet will be on fire. So I’m just gonna say ‘thanks, call if you need anything,’ and trust you to keep my kids alive for the next eight hours.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Steve said, but Bucky just pulled him in for a quick hug and then took off toward his bedroom.

Steve set about putting his plan in motion, sending Rocket and the Grootling back to their own ship and making a stack of sandwiches the same way he’d watched Bucky do each morning. Okay, so he’d never envisioned using the eidetic memory the serum had given him to keep track of who wanted the bread cut in triangles and who wanted the crusts cut off, but who was he to argue with fate? Next he notified the twins, who responded enthusiastically to the idea of a day out and raced off to pack up some gear. Hela took a little more convincing, and Steve definitely got a taste of the surly mood Bucky had described, but eventually she emerged from her room, in flawless makeup and an outfit that went a little heavy on the black leather but was made adorable by green fingerless gloves and legwarmers over patterned stockings, and joined the rest of them at the teleporter.

Steve had never teleported to a planet’s surface before, but it was better than he expected—not painful at all, just a flash of light that made him squint his eyes shut on the _Mae West_ and open them on a concrete arrival pad in a city on another planet. He had very little time to think about the inherent weirdness of that, because the kids immediately took off toward the park. It was a bright, sunny day on Xandar, and he let himself be led through a city that looked like a 1930s science fiction writer’s vision of a 2030s New York, to a park with wide expanses of green lawn, sparkling stone fountains, and plants with long, unfamiliar leaves.

Hela settled in under a tree and immediately became engrossed by one of the devices Bucky called a “communicator,” which looked like a mashup of an Earth tablet and a set of Kimoyo beads, and Thor approached Steve with a baseball, a glove, and a hopeful expression. Steve turned to make sure he wasn’t about to exclude Loki and had a bad moment where he couldn’t spot him, but when he looked again, the kid was curled up on the other side of Hela’s tree, his dark head bowed over a book that looked like something out of Stephen Strange’s library. “Okay, we can play for a while,” he said, fishing his own glove out of his backpack, and Thor took off running toward a point that Steve could definitely throw to, but a little farther than he thought a kid should try.

...Unless the kid was an Asgardian, apparently. A second later, the ball made a satisfying _thwack_ as it landed in his glove, and Steve let out a soft laugh in spite of himself. Of all the people in the universe, why was he surprised that _Thor_ had a good pitching arm?

It had been a long time since Steve hadn’t had to hold back—probably since the last time he’d trained with the adult Thor, who’d left his Earth for good sometime after the Infinity War. And as for baseball… “I think I’m out of practice,” he said, when Thor came jogging back toward him, ball in hand, ready for a break and a juice box. “I’ve hardly done this at all this since your father and I were kids.”

“Dad brings me here to play sometimes,” Thor said, sitting down on the grass beside Steve. “He told me one time that Earth dads played catch with their kids and he wanted to teach us, but then he said he used to play with his best friend, and then he kind of got really quiet for a while.” He paused. “Was that you? The best friend, I mean.”

“Yeah, he taught me too. I was terrible at it back then, of course.”

“Why?”

“Couldn’t see. Wasn’t very fast. Didn’t have any reach. Take your pick, really. How much has he told you about the two of us, growing up?”

“Not a lot. He’d get real sad when he talked about you, but not sad like he wanted to stop.” Thor looked at him, and Steve was reminded of the other thing people tended to forget about him: that not having certain kinds of knowledge was a hell of a lot different from stupidity. “The way he talked about you, we all thought you died.”

“Uh. Well. I thought your dad was dead too, for a long time.”

“Why?”

Steve tried to decide what would be the most honest answer, but _Because I saw him fall hundreds of feet off a train car and into a canyon in the Alps_ seemed like a bit much for a nine-year-old, which meant _He jumped in front of me before I could die to save half the universe from extinction at the hands of a purple lunatic_ was definitely out. “It’s complicated,” he said. “The important thing to know is, I never would have stayed away if I’d had any idea he was out here.”

“He was sad a lot before you came back,” Thor pressed on, and Steve abruptly realized that the kid had been waiting to have this conversation with him, wanting him to understand. “He said he wasn’t lonely, and that he was lucky to have us—”

“And he means it. He loves you all so much. He can hardly stop talking about any of you.”

“He talks to us like that about you,” Thor said pointedly.

“Uh. But you three are his priority; you know that, right?”

He wondered, later, what Thor would have said if they hadn’t been interrupted. But just then, there was a tremendous splash from behind them, and a shriek from a Xandarian woman who’d been splattered with water from one of the fountains. Steve whipped around, alert for trouble, and saw Loki on his hands and knees in the shallow base of the fountain, dripping, with an air of severely wounded dignity. And then he spotted the Xandarian kids running in the opposite direction, giggling, while Loki shook himself off and started to climb out of the water.

He made it there in time to lift Loki over the edge of the fountain, despite the fact that Loki immediately burst out with, “I can do it myself, leave me alone,” and pushed Steve’s hand away. Thor was only a few steps behind Steve, and didn’t fare much better; when he reached toward his brother, Loki said, “Go _away,_ Thor,” and Steve watched the flare of… pain? Disappointment? in Thor’s eyes as he backed off, leaving Loki to sit down on the stone rim with a distinctive squelch, glowering at Steve, the fountain, and presumably the unfairness of the universe in general.

“Hey,” Steve said softly. “Are you all right? What happened there?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Loki said sullenly.

Steve looked hard at him for a moment. Then he said, “Okay,” and took off his bomber jacket, draping it around Loki’s shoulders. “Here, put this on. That water must be colder than it looks. I swear you’re turning blue.”

Loki gave Steve one of the most sincerely offended looks that he’d ever been on the receiving end of in his long and strange lifetime. “Don’t make fun of me,” he said, clutching the jacket, and Steve’s heart started to ache. Between his artist’s eye and his own long familiarity with it from the inside, that posture told a story: he wasn’t cold, he was hiding in the jacket like it was his personal fortress.

“I wasn’t trying to,” he said, keeping his voice mild. “I’m sorry. Do you want to go home and change? We can teleport back to the ship and grab you some fresh clothes—”

“No.” It was too quick, and Loki’s eyes immediately turned in the direction the other kids had gone, and Steve read the story there, too, as plain as day. Having wounded pride was one thing, but admitting that they’d gotten to him was another. If anyone had asked him earlier that week, or even earlier that day, he would have said that obviously, Thor was the member of Bucky’s Odinbrood who he had the most in common with. Now he was starting to wonder.

“You know,” he said, “if you did want to tell somebody about it, I’m a pretty decent listener. I don’t have to tell your father if you don’t want me to.”

“You would, though. Because you’re his friend, not mine,” Loki said, shooting Steve an even more surly glare over the collar of the jacket.

Steve sighed. “Come with me,” he said, and somewhat to his surprise, Loki got up out of the puddle that had formed around him and followed Steve back to the spot by the tree where he’d left his gear. Hela was still some distance away, presumably out of earshot even for an Asgardian, and Thor had found a couple of other kids roughly his own age, who were kicking a ball around in a game of something that looked suspiciously like Earth soccer. Steve spread out the blanket he’d brought to have a picnic lunch on and lay down on his back, folding his arms behind his head and gazing up at the sky, which was almost but not quite the same blue as Earth’s. “Your dad ever do this with you?” he asked. “Look for pictures in the clouds?”

“Sometimes.” Loki settled in on the far edge of the blanket, not quite trusting Steve enough to lie down.

“When he and I were kids, we used to go up to the roof of the apartment building we lived in and look at the sky for hours, what we could see of it around the buildings, anyway. I’d go up there when I was pretending I wanted to be alone, mostly after I’d gotten beat up by some other kids, and he’d come up maybe ten, fifteen minutes later and act surprised when he found me.”

Loki made a sound that couldn’t quite be called a snort. “Right,” he said. “Like you ever got beat up. You’re _big.”_

“I didn’t used to be. Ask your dad, he’ll tell you. And I always got the worst of it in fights. I lost track of how many times he had to rescue me after I mouthed off to somebody bigger than me. Which was everyone,” he added ruefully. “At first I’d be angry when he tried to stick up for me, tell him not to get involved. He didn’t really give me a choice, though, even when I wished he would’ve stayed out of it and let me take a couple of punches. I knew it was because he cared about me, but sometimes I just wanted to scream at him, tell him how stupid he was to keep liking me when I obviously didn’t deserve it.”

Loki was still watching him warily, looking for the trick that he knew had to be there. “Dad’s kind of pushy like that sometimes,” he agreed. “Thor is too. He always wants me to play with his friends and tries to make us all like each other. But we always wind up doing what _they_ want to do. And his friends act like they’re doing me a favor letting me follow them around. Like I even want to hang out with them anyway.”

“You know what’s funny, though?” Steve said gently. “Once I got bigger, and I started to look like this, the problem didn’t really go away. People still thought that because I looked a certain way, it meant I’d think or act a certain way. They only saw what I was on the outside. I was lucky that I had your dad. He always saw me for who I really was, and he didn’t just put up with me; he liked the things about me that made me different. Even though sometimes they kind of drove him crazy.” He paused. “Loki, I know you haven’t known me for very long, and I’m sure you don’t want to hear this old man’s advice. But I think Thor might be your person who sees everything good and bad about you, and loves you for all of it.”

Loki considered that; Steve could almost see him turning it over in his head, puzzling over it. “But Thor’s an idiot,” he finally said.

“Why? He can be kind of scattered, but he gets good grades, and he knows how to get along with people, which seems pretty smart to me.”

“Yeah,” Loki agreed, sounding angry about it.

“So I guess the only thing that makes him an idiot is that he likes you?”

Back in his own timeline and his own universe, Steve would never have believed he could leave even a miniature version of the god of mischief speechless, although it only lasted a few seconds before Loki made another scoffing noise and flopped down on the blanket. “You sound like my dad.”

“Well, I think your dad’s pretty smart, too, so I’m taking that as a compliment.”

There was a brief silence, and Steve waited it out, feeling this planet’s sun on his face and staring up at the clouds. Finally, Loki broke it. “Did my dad tell you I got in trouble for fighting at school?” he said.

“He might’ve mentioned it,” Steve said, trying not to roll his eyes. Parents these days… No, Bucky was right, kids shouldn’t _need_ to fight and adults should damn well put a stop to it when it happened, but still, if he’d been suspended every time he mouthed off and instigated a playground brawl, he still wouldn’t have graduated.

“Dad was really mad at me. Like _really_ mad. He was yelling and everything.”

“Yeah, he yells at me sometimes too.”

“Everybody thought it was my fault,” Loki said, and Steve kept his face very still, so that his expression wouldn’t give him away. _There_ it was, the crack in the facade. “I’m always the one it happens to, so they always think I started it.”

“Did you tell them it wasn’t your fault?”

Loki laughed, a surprisingly bitter sound from such a small kid. “Why? Nobody believes me. They believe _Thor,_ but Thor was out sick that day. That’s why the other kids came after me, because Thor wasn’t there and that meant they could get away with it. And even if they do believe me, they just say it’s not an excuse for fighting and that bullies just want your attention and you have to just ignore them.”

“Well, that’s some bullshit,” Steve’s mouth said, almost of its own accord, before his brain had time to kick in and stop it.

Loki rolled over on the blanket and stared at him. “What?”

“Okay, sorry, I didn’t mean to swear and you shouldn’t say that word,” Steve said, “but it _is_ a terrible way to think. If you stand up to bullies, yeah, you get hit sometimes. And fighting shouldn’t be your first choice if you can avoid it. It’s better to try to talk people around to your side if you can, which is something I think you’re pretty good at when you try. But if nobody stands up to bullies, it just means they get what they want, and then they grow up thinking they can get away with a lot worse things than being aggressive jerks on the schoolyard.”

“So it’d be okay if I hit somebody who said I was a freak and I didn’t belong there,” Loki said skeptically.

“I wouldn’t recommend throwing the first punch,” Steve said, fully aware that historically, he hadn’t been that good at taking his own advice. “But I’d sure as he—I’d sure try to knock them down with the second. Maybe it wouldn’t do anything, but maybe it’d make them think twice about it the next time the next time they tried to go after somebody smaller than them. All I know is, sometimes things keep getting worse until somebody stands up and says ‘that’s enough,’ and it takes a lot of guts to be the one to do it.”

Loki propped himself up, his chin on his small fists, and looked at Steve. “You’re different than I thought you were gonna be,” he said.

“I get that a lot,” Steve said, and he might have elaborated if, once again, he hadn’t been interrupted at just the wrong moment.

Steve hadn’t looked too closely at the duffel bag Thor had packed for the outing. It was a mistake he wouldn’t make again. But if he had, he might have noticed that Thor carried it like it was heavy and unwieldy, even more than he would have expected given how much larger it was than his usual schoolbag. If he’d tested the weight of it, he might have been very surprised by what he learned. And if he hadn’t been so intent on his conversation with Loki, he might have noticed when Thor retrieved the bag, took out his magic hammer, and started swinging it around in the exact way Bucky had ordered him not to do on the _Mae West_ , which, Thor would later point out, he was _not on_ at the time of his alleged offense. So Steve missed his chance to witness one of the most formative events of this young Thor’s life: the moment when he realized that if he spun the hammer around really fast to build up some momentum and then sort of _threw_ it without letting go of the handle, then he might, he _might,_ just be able to fly.

Unfortunately, as a novice aviator, it hadn’t occurred to him to check for obstructions in his flight path before takeoff.

Steve was exceptionally fast, but he knew from racing Sam that not even his top sprinting speed could beat actual flight. By the time he crossed half the park to the crash site, Thor was dusting himself off, grinning, and a Nova Corps cop was holding him by the collar. When Steve approached, the cop turned to him and said, “Sir, is this young man with you?”

“He’s—” Steve hadn’t actually put a name on the relationship yet, so he said, “I’m in charge of him today, yes. Is there a problem, officer?”

The cop gave him a perplexed look. Steve looked back evenly, daring him to say it, and he finally did: “This young man was apparently in possession of some kind of experimental flying technology. As you can see, he doesn’t appear to be harmed, but this tree—”

“Oh, I see,” Steve said, pretending to notice the tree in question for the first time. Later, he would learn that it was uninspiringly known as a Xandarian oak. This was, or had been, an impressive specimen, ten feet tall and as thick around as his waist. Now it was roots-up on the ground, half of its branches submerged in another fountain, having apparently just missed falling on a group of picnickers. “So you’re telling me this boy,” and he carefully extracted Thor from the cop’s grip, subtly, but too quickly for him to react and stop it, “was flying through the park and knocked over this tree?”

Sadly, the tone of polite incredulity that over the years had worked on dozens of Brooklyn policemen, not a few S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, and at least one priest didn’t seem to be making headway with the Nova cop. “Sir, we have video of the incident,” he said, tapping a small lens on his chest that must have attached to a body camera.

“Oh.” Steve made a show of dusting Thor off, silently willing him to keep quiet; he was trying, but he couldn’t stop grinning. “Well, I’d say the important thing here is that no one got hurt.”

 _“Sir,”_ the cop said, placing a gentle but firm hand on Steve’s arm. “I’m afraid there is the matter of destruction of public property to discuss.”

“Oh, is that all?” It was a lucky break that Steve had already taken off his jacket. He walked around the trunk of the fallen tree, examining it from several angles, judging the leverage. Then he squatted beside the trunk, slid his hands underneath, braced his feet, and pushed.

It was probably for the best that he didn’t have the angle to watch the cop’s face while he stood the tree upright, landing the root ball back in its original position with a _thump_ and a shower of leaves. He stepped forward and patted down a patch of loose soil with his foot. Then he met the cop’s eyes and said calmly, “Are we good here?”

Nova Corps police, Steve would learn later, underwent some of the strictest training in the galaxy, which was probably why this one simply breathed deeply and went on with his job. “Regarding the unlicensed flying technology,” he began.

“Oh,” Steve said. “Yeah, why don’t you go ahead and impound that for us?”

It was a hell of a bluff, because the poor cop, presumably a good guy who didn’t deserve to be faced with Steve Rogers’ bullshit, easily could have been one of the few people in the universe who turned out to be worthy. But Steve got lucky with this one, because the cop walked over to Mjolnir, gave the handle a tug, and frowned. He planted his feet, like Steve had done with the tree, and tried again, then once more, then let go and looked at the hammer intently—and that was when Thor stepped forward, picked up the hammer, and slung it over his shoulder like a hobo knapsack in a Charlie Chaplin movie, looking at the cop with wide-eyed innocence all the while.

The cop closed his eyes, took a long, slow, breath, and opened them again. “Sir,” he said, “I’m going to have to ask you and your children to leave the park.”

 

“Why didn’t you tell him we weren’t your kids?” Hela said, as they were walking away from the park.

Steve looked at her. He’d wanted to spend a little time with each of the Odinbrood on their day out, but Hela was the one he felt he needed to connect with most of all. It wasn’t just that she was the oldest, and probably the least flexible when it came to acquiring a new parent; it was also that he didn’t have the first idea what to expect. In the childhood version of Thor, he could see seeds of the adult he’d known as a teammate and friend, and he’d at least met Loki before, although this version seemed to be leaning in a very different direction than the one he’d once fought in Stuttgart. Hela was a wildcard, and currently he placed her somewhere between Peggy Carter and Natasha Romanoff on the “tough nut to crack” scale. “Well, first off, since I didn’t hear anybody say we were being detained, I figured it was none of his business,” he began. “And second, you’re my best friend’s kids, which makes you… not _not_ my kids, if that makes sense. We’ve got a saying back on Earth: it takes a village to raise a child. I’d like to think I’m part of your village.”

“Hm,” Hela said, which gave him absolutely no idea whether that meant she’d taken it well, or badly, or was still thinking it over. And here he’d thought Clint was exaggerating when he talked about his kids doing the monosyllabic teenager thing. He wanted to reach out to her, make sure she understood that he was as interested in getting to know her as he was when it came to the twins. And then he realized the answer was right in front of him.

“Hey, Hela,” he said, “I don’t actually know where we’re going from here. I told your dad we’d pick up dinner on the way home, so we’ve got some time to kill before we head back. Is there anywhere you like to go when you’re on the planet?”

“Hey,” Loki said, from where he was straggling along next to Thor, just behind them. “How come she gets to pick?”

“If we have time, I’ll make sure everybody gets a turn,” Steve said. “If not, then somebody else gets to pick first next time. How about it, Hela? What would you like to do?”

Hela started to shrug, then stopped herself in mid-motion. It was unsettling, the way he could almost see the light bulb going on over her head. “We-e-ell,” she said, “there is one place I’ve been asking Dad to take me for a long time, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“Okay,” said Steve. “Lead the way.”

 

“Hey.” Steve tapped on the door to Bucky’s bedroom, then eased it open. “How are you feeling?”

“Mmph.” Bucky sat up, brushing his hair back, and blinked at him, taking stock. “Better,” he said, surprised. “A lot better. My throat doesn’t hurt anymore. I think I might’ve actually slept it off.”

“Good.” Steve came in and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Made you some tea.”

“I hate tea.”

“It’s your mom’s recipe.” When Bucky looked at him blankly, Steve clarified, “Mostly whiskey.”

“Gimme.” Bucky took a sip, grimaced, and took another, because he was never not going to be a Depression kid and the only thing it was more of a crime to waste than food was alcohol. Come to think of it, he’d gotten Steve to choke down a lot of medicine this way. That was when it clicked. “You were really worried about me, weren’t you?” he said, equal parts touched and amused.

“Well, yeah. It’d be just my luck to get pulled into a different universe to find you and then lose you to a space virus or something.”

Bucky laughed. “You know, people are gonna make fun of you if you keep putting the word _space_ in front of everything. Things out here aren’t space things, they’re just things.”

“You do it all the time.”

“Yeah, and Hela laughs at me, that’s how I know. Speaking of which, I’m assuming you and my children survived each other.”

“I would classify our outing as relatively disaster-free,” Steve said carefully.

“Good enough for me. Honestly, any day nobody gets chased halfway across the sector by angry Kymellians, I feel like I’m doing something right. You feed them?”

“We brought back takeout. The kids said you like something called Thai-Skrull fusion.” Steve paused, then added, “It’s keeping warm in the space stove.”

“Ugh. Rogers, I see what you’re doing. Stop being a space troll.”

“Shut up and drink your space tea,” Steve said cheerfully. “Do you want me to make you a plate and bring it in here?”

Bucky’s eyes narrowed. “Rogers, what are you up to?”

“What? I thought we just established I’m being nice because I’m worried about you.”

“Nope. You’re coddling me, which is not your style. Anyway, I have three kids. I know when someone’s trying to hide something from me.” Bucky threw the blankets aside, grabbed his robe, and slid his feet into slippers. “C’mon, let’s go get it over with.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, but the fact that he didn’t have anything better to follow it up with was telling.

“Look. Steve. Is anybody hurt?”

“No—”

“Anybody in jail or have a warrant out for their arrest?”

“No!”

“Do I have a history of freaking out when people rip their faces off in front of me, attack me while wearing some type of animal costume, or invade my home planet?”

“You were… remarkably calm about all of those, given all the givens.”

“Then I’m probably not gonna freak out about whatever dumb shit you did now.” Bucky swung the door open and walked out to the kitchen, where he stopped in the doorway, so abruptly that Steve bumped into him and nearly knocked them both over.

“You got a dog,” he said.

“So, technically, we didn’t _get_ a dog,” Loki began. The kids were clustered around the largest canine Bucky had ever seen, and that included a pack of wolves in Siberia in his Winter Soldier days that had made him turn around and nope right out of his mission, orders and Hydra be damned. The dog was black, with luminous green eyes, and it was nearly as tall than Hela, who was kneeling beside it with her arms around its neck. “They were looking for people who could foster them, and we have so much room—”

“He was on day nine!” Hela cried, gripping the dog tighter. “They only get to stay in the shelter for ten days before they _euthanize_ them, Dad!”

Bucky looked at Steve, and Steve looked back helplessly. “You do realize,” Bucky said, “that those shelter workers saw your dumb ass coming a mile away.”

Steve set his jaw. “It’s a trial period,” he said. “The dog can go back if it doesn’t work out.”

“Yeah, that’s another thing. I’m pretty sure that thing is not a dog.”

“Then you can’t be mad at us for getting a dog,” Loki began. Bucky glared at him, and he shrank back behind the not-a-dog, which flopped its tail back and forth and regarded Bucky hopefully.

“Don’t even start,” he said. “It goes back.”

“He’s not an _it,_ Dad,” said Hela, who had never expressed any concern about the Sacred Reznor’s lack of pronouns. Then again, it was hard to miss the gleaming intelligence in this animal’s eyes, while the Reznor came across as only slightly smarter than the average rock. “He’s a he, and his name is Fenris.”

Bucky closed his eyes. _Frigga._ She’d probably arranged this, just like she had with Mjolnir. “Fuck,” he said, softly but distinctly.

“Dad!” Thor chimed in from the other side of the not-a-dog, whose ears he was scratching enthusiastically. “That’s a swear jar word.”

“Swear jar? What swear jar? I’m having a sudden-onset episode of amnesia about the swear jar, like you all apparently did about all the times I told you we were _not getting a dog.”_ Bucky turned back to Steve wearily. If it had only been Steve _or_ Hela, he probably could have held the line, but four on one? No, scratch that; it was five on one, because now even Fenris was looking at him sadly. Sometimes surrender was the only reasonable option. “Okay,” he said, “we’ll give it a try. But he goes straight back to the shelter if he does any damage, and I’m holding all of you accountable if he tries to take a bite out of the Sacred Reznor.”

There was a scuffle from the other end of the room as the Reznor, hearing its name, sat up in its crate and shuffled out to see if an opportunity for snacks was about to present itself. Hela’s arms tightened around Fenris’s neck, but the wolf still craned its massive head forward, opening its mouth in an innocent, tongue-lolling grin.

Later, Bucky would mark that moment as the one where he realized the Reznor wasn’t nearly so stupid as he’d always thought it was, because it froze, the wiry hair on its back standing straight up, its eyes wide and fixed on the wolf. Then there was an audible _pop_ as it vanished, and by the time Bucky’s brain caught up to what he was seeing, he could already hear the Reznor scrabbling around on top of the refrigeration unit.

Thor’s jaw dropped. “The Sacred Reznor could teleport this whole time?” he said, giving voice to exactly what Bucky was thinking. “How come you make us take it on walks, then?”

Bucky let out a long, slow breath. “You know what?” he said, turning to Steve. “You were right. Space viruses are nothing to mess around with. I think I should go back to bed and let you bring me dinner, just to be safe.”

“Okay,” Steve said, clearly as bemused as he was.

“You can handle the dishes, and maybe the chores for a couple days, too. Do the laundry, take out the trash...”

“Whatever you want, Buck,” Steve said, without taking his eyes off the Sacred Reznor.

Bucky managed to wait until his back was turned to all of them before he grinned. “Idiot,” he muttered under his breath, their very oldest term of endearment, as he left the kitchen.

Whatever he wanted, huh? He was going to hold Steve to that, once he was sure the kids were asleep and the bedroom door was solidly locked, and he was going to keep milking this one for a long time after that, too. Maybe there were some up sides to dog ownership after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my favorite chapter. ^_^


	9. Chapter 9

Hela pretended to be asleep when Dad came to check on her at bedtime, even going so far as to clutch Clint Barkton in her arms to add veracity, and breathed deeply and evenly until he eased her door shut and returned to his own bedroom. After a moment she got up and cracked her door open, not sure what she was waiting for until she heard Steve’s heavy tread on the floor of the corridor and his gentle tap on Dad’s bedroom door. “...can’t wait to hear what you have to say for yourself,” she heard Dad say, as the door snapped shut again, and then she pulled on her robe and sped down the corridor to the twins’ room again.

Thor was already asleep and snoring softly when she came in, although Loki was sitting up in the chair by the porthole, wrapped up in the comforter from his bed and staring out at the stars. Hela put a finger over her lips to warn him not to make a sound, and woke Thor with a hand over his mouth and a rough shake to the shoulder. “We have to talk,” she whispered, motioning for both of them to follow.

She led them to the kitchen, where a bed had been made up for Fenris until such time as he was confirmed to be well and truly housebroken. The dog swished its tail back and forth in a slow rhythm when it saw her, further confirming her determination that he was a good dog who was not going back to the pound no matter what. She got out the soy milk and put a pan on the stove, turning the heat on low. “Alibi,” she said, when Loki raised a questioning eyebrow at her. “If Dad comes in, we’re gonna say we couldn’t sleep and I’m making hot cocoa.”

“I _was_ asleep,” Thor grumbled. Then he added, hopefully, “Will you make me a Pop-Tart?”

“Thor! Try to focus. We have an emergency here,” Hela told him sharply. “Not only is Dad really mad about Fenris, but he called Steve an idiot right in front of all of us. I think they’re in Dad’s bedroom having a fight right now. This is really, really bad, you guys.”

“He didn’t sound that mad to me,” Thor said, yawning. “If you’re not gonna make Pop-Tarts, then can I go back to bed?”

Hela exchanged the silent look with Loki that meant, _I love him, but this is why we don’t put him in charge of anything,_ and Loki frowned, knowing that the look also implied, _I expect better of you._ “The smart thing to do would be to send Fenris back,” he said, in the tones of someone who was reluctantly, and somewhat hopelessly, playing devil’s advocate.

“Fuck that,” said Hela, trying to make it sound as emphatic as when Dad said it. After all, he wasn’t here to enforce the swear jar rule, and neither of her brothers would dare tell on her. Emboldened, she went on, “We need to get serious about making them fall in love before Steve goes back to Earth again. We never should have let him leave the first time, and we can’t count on being that lucky twice.”

“He came back because he likes Dad. That’s not luck,” Thor said, “it’s because he wanted to. That sounds like a pretty good start to me.”

“You don’t understand,” Hela said. “We’re on a clock, Thor. There’s…” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “There’s somebody else Steve likes, and if Dad doesn’t get his act together in a hurry, he might miss his chance.”

“What?” Thor said, sitting up.

“Tell him what you told me, Loki.”

Under the blanket he’d lugged into the kitchen with him, Loki shrugged. “When you were distracting Steve—”

“You mean while I was playing catch with Steve?” Thor said, a little frown line appearing on his forehead.

“Yeah. It was a perfect distraction, and while you were doing that, I did the thing…” Loki made a hand motion that was clearly meant to indicate casting an illusion of himself doing one thing and then sneaking off to do a different thing before continuing, “And I went through his stuff. Oh, like you’re so much better,” he added preemptively, as Thor was opening his mouth to reproach him. “You were asking him questions too, we _all_ want to know why we never met Dad’s best friend before and why Dad always talked about him like he was dead. I just took the direct approach.”

Thor sighed, but he didn’t argue. Hela would give him that: once a deed was done, he was pretty good at letting it go. “And?”

“I looked in that sketchbook he’s always carrying around, the one he drew the picture in and then ripped it out and gave it to Dad.” Loki nodded toward the refrigeration unit, where Dad had hung up a sketch of the four Barneses together. It was a good likeness: Dad and Thor were smiling, while Loki and Hela looked more reserved and, in Hela’s opinion, more dignified, but all of them looked happy. “I knew most of the people in the pictures—Aunt Shuri and Aunt Natasha and Uncle Sam and a bunch of other people from Earth. But there were also all these pictures of one lady I’d never seen before. And later on, when he put his jacket on me, there was this little metal gadget in the pocket, it didn’t do anything, I think it’s broken, _but,_ there was a picture of the same lady inside it when I opened it, and when I asked him about it, he got all red and said it was a friend and made me give it back.”

“So?”

“So Steve _likes_ that lady, which means we have to hurry up and convince him that he likes Dad better, before he does something stupid like asking the lady to be his girlfriend.”

“Oh,” Thor said. He still wasn’t sold, but he was willing to concede that maybe this was an area his siblings understood better than he did. “So what do we do?”

“We need to trick them into doing all the stuff they want to do anyway. Like kissing,” Loki said. It still seemed a little icky from his perspective, but Dad said it wasn’t if you liked the person. And the idea of Dad and Steve kissing each other… that was kind of nice, actually. Sure, they were both a thousand years old, so he hoped they wouldn’t do it in public or anything, but once in a while it might be okay.

“We definitely need to get them to kiss,” Hela agreed. “As soon as possible. Any ideas for that?”

“I might have one,” Loki said thoughtfully. “I need a lake and a boat and a singing crab, though.”

“How are we supposed to trick them into going to a lake and getting on a boat?”

“Oh, I was thinking more about bringing the lake to them—”

“Let’s move anything that involves flooding the ship to Plan B,” Hela said quickly.

“When people go on dates, they mostly go out to eat,” said Thor.

“That’s not a bad idea, Thor,” Hela said thoughtfully.

“Eating?” said Thor, who still hadn’t given up on the hope of Pop-Tarts.

“No, making them go on a date. The problem is that they don’t do things where it’s just the two of them. We’ll put them in a situation that’s so romantic, they won’t be able to help falling in love with each other.”

“Great,” Thor sighed. “How do we do that?”

“I’ll make a list,” Hela said. In her own mind, she’d already started running through the most romantic scenes from the books and movies that she liked and her brothers didn’t, compiling the common elements: candles, sunsets, flowers, chocolate, music, dancing. Bubble baths? Was that going too far? Probably not; Dad and Steve were both unreasonably oblivious, and it might take a big push. “This would be a lot easier if one of them was a werewolf,” she sighed.

“I don’t think werewolves would work in space,” said Loki. “Depending on how you look at it, there’s either always moonlight or there’s never moonlight, so how would they know when the wolf stuff was gonna happen?”

“Oh, like you know so much,” Hela said, annoyed that she’d never thought to ask that question herself. Luckily, the milk was starting to bubble, so she had an excuse to climb up on the stepstool and root around in the cabinet for the sugar and cocoa. Her head and shoulders were inside the cabinet when she heard Loki say, “Uh-oh.”

Hela turned to find Bucky standing in the kitchen doorway, looking far more surprised to see them than any of them were to see him. “What are you kids doing up?” he asked, brushing his hair out of his face.

“Thor couldn’t sleep,” Loki said smoothly, earning a glare from Thor that was half annoyance and half resignation. “So Hela’s making cocoa.”

“Right, Thor woke all of the rest of you up,” Bucky said, the corner of his mouth tilted upward. “Kids, you don’t have to lie to me, okay? I know what’s going on here.”

“You do?” Hela asked warily.

“You three just couldn’t wait till morning to play with the dog, could you?”

Hela let out the breath she’d been holding. “He’s really well-behaved,” she began. “Look at how he’s just been right there in his bed this whole time—”

“It’s okay, Hela. You can stop worrying; I’m not gonna send him back. He’d still better not bother the Reznor, though,” Bucky said, with a warning glance at Fenris, who twitched an ear, opened one bright canine eye briefly, and shut it again. “You want a hand with the cocoa?”

“It’s okay, Dad, I’ve got it.” Hela was already reaching for the measuring cups and the whisk. “You can go back to bed, if you want.”

“Yeah, ’cause I sleep real well when I know you kids are up and using the stove.” Bucky’s gaze moved slowly from Loki, huddled in his blanket, to Thor, who was studiously avoiding eye contact, and finally to Hela, who was trying to look nonchalant but couldn’t quite hide the worry in her eyes. He knew his children, and he knew something was up; he also knew that none of them would tell him what was troubling them until they were good and ready, and sometimes there was no magical right thing to say about it. Sometimes the only thing he could do was be there. “Hey,” he said slowly, “you know what we haven’t done in a long time?”

“What?” Hela asked.

“Fort Barnes.”

“Oh my God, _Dad,”_ Hela wailed. “We haven’t done that since I was a _baby.”_

“Which means it’s been way too long,” Bucky said, in his most reasonable tone.

“What’s Fort Barnes?” asked Thor.

“You see that, Hela? We haven’t done it in so long that your brothers don’t even remember it. I’d be remiss as a parent if I didn’t educate them. You don’t want to play, you can stay in here and clean up the kitchen,” Bucky added, which made Hela snap her mouth shut just as she was about to start protesting. “C’mon, let’s go. And put the cocoa in the travel mugs with the lids on them. We’re gonna need rations. After all, there’s a war on.”

 

After being summarily kicked out of Bucky’s bed once the evening’s surprisingly creative round of sex concluded (“Oh, quit your bellyaching, Rogers, you know we can’t take a chance on the kids waking up early and catching us in bed together”), Steve had stumbled back to his own room in a state of relaxation he hadn’t felt in a decade, fully prepared to sleep for the next twelve hours or until Bucky woke him up for a repeat performance, whichever came first. So it was strange to wake up barely an hour later to the sound of something heavy being pushed down the hall, followed by a lot of muffled giggling. He was going to roll over and try to go back to sleep when he realized it was probably a bad thing if Bucky was also asleep and the kids were up and unsupervised, so he forced his eyes open, pushed himself up from the bed, and started toward the door.

...Then he made a brief detour back to the dresser, because he’d realized it might be a good idea to put some pajamas on first, but after _that,_ he walked out into the main living quarters and stopped in his tracks.

The room had been swallowed up by an enormous pillow fort. The sofa had been pushed back, the cushions propped up to make walls on two sides; blankets were draped across the top, tied together at the corners, with lumps that Steve guessed must be kitchen chairs holding up the canopy at the other end. There was a fit of giggling—Steve wasn’t convinced that some of it wasn’t Bucky—and the sound of at least three people going _“Shh!”_ at each other at the same time. Then a gap appeared between two of the top blankets, and a pair of bright blue eyes looked out. “Halt! Who goes there?” Thor demanded, in what really was a remarkably imperious voice for an eight-year-old.

Steve saluted without even thinking about it. “Captain Steven Grant Rogers of the U.S. Army, reporting for duty, sir!” he said crisply.

“What’s the password?” a muffled voice—Loki’s—demanded.

“Um. Allied Command forgot to supply that information, sir.”

“Come on, Rogers, take a stab at it,” Bucky urged him, laughing. “It’s not like it’s  _hard_  or anything.”

“Yeah, it’s a _grate_ password,” Loki piped up. “I _dairy_ you to try to guess it.”

“He doesn’t get it,” Thor informed his siblings, in a stage whisper.

“Hela?” Bucky said. “You want to give him a hint?”

There was silence for several seconds, followed by a heavy sigh, before Hela said, “You guys are really milking this for all it’s worth, aren’t you?”, in a tone of deeply disgusted resignation.

Steve closed his eyes, just in case any of them was peeking; he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing him roll them. “Is the password _cheese?”_ he asked, and all four of the Barneses cheered.

A corner of the blanket flipped back. “Entry to Fort Barnes is granted, Captain Steve,” Thor declared, and Steve dropped to his knees and crawled into a gap between two cushions. Inside, Fort Barnes was illuminated by soft light diffused through the blankets, with two mattresses, presumably pulled off the kids’ beds, covering the floor. It was a tight fit, considering the space already held a super-soldier-sized human, three kids, and an enormous canine of debatable status, but Steve wedged himself into the space between Bucky and Fenris without much trouble. “Wow,” he said, “this is a little more elaborate than the ones we used to build in your mom’s living room, Buck.”

“Well, we have more room and more help,” Bucky said. “And more pillows.”

“I see that. Good construction. I’m impressed. So who’s this fort built to keep out?”

“Anyone who’s not a Barnes,” said Loki.

“Oh, no. Fenris is not a Barnes,” said Bucky. “I said he could stay, but I’m not gonna be one of those guys who talks about the dog like he’s one of my children. We’ve gotta draw the line somewhere.”

“He’s an honorary Barnes,” Thor said. “Like Steve.”

“Sure, Steve is a Barnes, but Fenris is an animal, and I’m not letting you kids act like he’s a member of the family who gets a vote in things,” Bucky said. “...What’s the matter, Steve? You okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve said quickly. “Yeah.”

He was thinking about the vision that Wanda Maximoff had made him see when they fought her, before she switched sides: about how the shadow of Peggy had asked him to imagine _home,_ and when he tried, there was nothing. About Bucky in Wakanda, during his recovery, casually tossing out the words _headed home_ in reference to his little hut on the goat farm; Steve had missed a step and stumbled, and Bucky had reached out with his right hand to steady him and made some crack about how even the serum couldn’t make him any less of a klutz, but all Steve could think about was how the word had made him realize Bucky actually felt like that about Wakanda… and he didn’t. He’d wanted to—God, who was he kidding, he would’ve stayed in that hut for the rest of his life if Bucky had asked him to—but it would never be _home,_ and probably that was why Bucky never asked. He loved Bucky and Bucky was happy and that had been more than enough, but pieces of Steve’s heart were scattered across eight decades and three continents by then, and _home_ was something he thought of in the past tense. And then, after he lost Bucky for the last time, well. That was pretty much the end of that.

People always thought he was the one who rescued Bucky—and sure, he had, from Hydra, twice, and from the U.N., and Tony, and whatever else Bucky cared to credit him with, he’d take it. But Steve knew the truth: that Bucky had always been the one who rescued him. And here he was, doing it again, without even trying to: giving Steve a place where he belonged. Where maybe, after all these years and all these miles, he could finally say he’d come home.

Then the dog farted.

When he was a child, Steve had been taught, by an increasingly aggravated Sarah Rogers, that he was supposed to use polite phrases like “pass gas” for this particular bodily function, if he absolutely had to talk about it at all. But he was pretty sure even she would have agreed that no amount of polite phrasing could save this situation. The smell was immediate, intense, and slightly overpowering for a super-soldier, much less a kid. That would have been bad enough already, but then Thor, who had the misfortune of being closest to Fenris’s hind end, cried out in dismay and threw himself backward, which had the even more unfortunate effect of knocking the couch cushions over and collapsing the canopy of blankets, and _that_ led to several minutes of complete pandemonium while everybody dug themselves out. It took a while after that for Bucky to make himself heard over the three kids all shouting various degrees of recriminations at each other, while Loki made theatrical gagging sounds and Hela protested that it wasn’t poor Fenris’s fault, he was a good dog who was under _stress_ and had probably only been given awful food in the shelter. “Um,” Steve said, when they’d all finally made it out of the maze of cushions and into the relatively clear air of the living room, “I hate to say it, but I think it was my fault, actually.”

“What’d you _do,_ Rogers,” Bucky said, eyes narrowing.

“Nothing intentional, just… The dog seemed a little nervous when we brought him onboard, and I thought I should give him a treat to help him ease into things. Clint’s dog really likes cheese, so I thought I’d cut off a little slice from the block of cheddar in the fridge—”

“A _little slice_ didn’t turn the dog into a goddamn bioweapon, Steve!”

“Swear j—” Thor started to say, and got a sharp elbow in the ribs from Hela.

“I didn’t say it did,” Steve said, his face starting to go pink. “But I didn’t get the rest of the block back in the fridge quick enough, and… Funny story, it turns out the dog is tall enough to grab things off the counter and swallow them whole, if he’s really determined about it.”

Bucky blinked. “Oh my God,” he said. “The brand new block of cheddar I just opened yesterday? The _one-pound_ brand new block of cheddar?”

“Yeah. I’m afraid so. I… Buck? Are you okay?”

Bucky’s expression had gone blank and unreadable. “Take the dog to the kitchen,” he said, in a slightly strangled voice. “At least in there, we’ve got a ventilation fan.”

“Yeah, okay, Buck.” A hundred years they’d known each other now, and there were still times when Steve couldn’t read Bucky at all. He grabbed Fenris by the collar, ignoring the dog’s disgruntled look, and hauled him into the kitchen, where he watched the dog settle back down on the picnic blanket Hela had laid out for him, put his shaggy head down on his paws, and look at him balefully. “Oh, don’t be like that,” Steve said. “I told you it had to be our secret about the cheese. It’s your fault we got caught.” But Fenris only huffed and turned his snout toward the wall, so Steve guessed the lack of sympathy went both ways.

By the time he got back to the living room, the carnage had been cleaned up—a little—in that most of the cushions had been tossed in the general direction of the couch, and the mattresses had been cleared off enough to sleep on. Lucky thing, that, because Bucky and all three of the kids were doing just that: Hela’s head was resting on Bucky’s shoulder, while Loki was curled up against his left side and Thor was flopped across his metal arm, in a way that would have been excruciating for both of them if it had been Bucky’s other arm, or if Thor hadn’t been young enough to fall asleep in any improbable position. Steve smiled to himself, grabbed a couple of blankets—there were plenty to choose from—and tucked them gently over each of the Barneses. He was about to head back to his own bed when he felt cold metal fingers curl around his ankle.

“You all right, Buck?” he said quietly.

Bucky muttered something that was ninety percent incoherent, although Steve thought he caught the word “idiot” in there somewhere, but he tugged on Steve’s ankle again before he let go, which made it pretty clear what he wanted. “Okay,” Steve said, with a soft laugh, and lay down on the other side of Hela, grabbing a blanket of his own to wrap up in. He expected to lie awake for a long time, but there was something so soothing about the gentle, even breathing of the sleeping kids that he drifted off almost immediately.

So he never saw Hela’s eyes open, just a crack, or the small worried frown that crossed her face as she watched the tension ease out of his. _She_ knew for sure that her father and Steve were perfect for each other. It was written all over both of them—in the way Steve had looked at Dad inside the blanket fort; in the way Dad had laughed after Steve left the room with Fenris, and sworn them all to secrecy about it, just like he had when she’d caught him laughing about Loki and the bananas; in a thousand other little ways that neither of the two of them seemed to be able to see. And she’d seen the way both of them let their eyes follow the other for a minute too long when one of them was leaving the ship. She’d seen this phenomenon in a hundred movies, read about it in a thousand romance novels, but she’d never thought she’d see it in real life.

She understood if her dad was a little more hesitant about falling in love in the first place, because she knew he’d been hurt a lot in the past. In fact, she was starting to wonder if, on some level, he actually did know he and Steve were supposed to be together, but he didn’t know how to get there. She’d honestly thought that maybe he was about to kiss Steve, on the day Steve left for his trip to Earth, and when he didn’t, she’d been so mad and frustrated that she hadn’t been able to talk to him for _days._ But if it had just been her dad being dumb, that would have been fine; she could have trusted him to eventually figure it out.

Steve, on the other hand… Well, she liked Steve really well, they all did, but she didn’t _know_ him yet, did she? Apparently he’d thought their dad was dead, but that didn’t explain why he hadn’t bothered to verify that in almost nine years! And after finding out he was alive, he’d had to run right back to Earth, and probably right back to the pretty lady he’d drawn all the pictures of in that sketchbook of his. That was why she’d lobbied so hard to get him to take her with him—not just to have a chance to spend some time with him where she might be able to talk him around to thinking of her dad in a more romantic way, but also so she could keep him from doing anything stupid. But nooo, Dad had made her stay home for no better reason than that she had to go to _middle school,_ and now the situation was a total mess, because if they didn’t figure it out soon, Steve might end up back on Earth with the book lady permanently.

 _And then,_ the tiny voice in the back of Hela’s head whispered, _and then it will be true what Odin said, won’t it? That your only purpose is to destroy things, and that’s all you’ll ever be good for. Because you thought you were bringing them together and making Dad happy, but if Steve decides to be with someone else forever, then all you’ll have done is broken your Dad’s heart._

Hela tightened her fist around a handful of blanket, and silently resolved that come hell or high water, there was no way that was ever going to happen. She’d made this mess, and it was clear that she couldn’t count on either Dad and Steve or her idiot brothers to fix it. This time, she was going to have to figure it out for herself.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to say I'm _really_ bad at responding to comments because anxiety, but every single one of them has made me smush my face and go, "Eeee!" I love you guys and I'm so happy we're on this ridiculous journey together.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: bullying, child briefly in peril, minor discussion of homophobia (although none is actually shown onscreen).

“This was a terrible idea, Rogers!”

“It was your idea, Barnes!” Steve shouted back at Bucky, over the hail of gunfire that had them pinned down on the wrong side of the landing shuttle, the far side from the entry hatch. “Why don’t you have a gun? Did you lose it when we were running away from the robots?”

“Of course I have a gun! It’s bullets I’m out of!” Bucky braced his feet against the curved metal of the wing, panting. “Here’s the plan,” he called, over the noise. “I’m gonna count down from three and then we’re gonna run. You get to the hatch and I’ll cover you while you open it. All you have to do is get to the keypad and type in 0-7-0-4, got it?”

“Why are you covering me in this plan? I should be covering you!”

“Because _I’ve_ got a metal arm that can stop bullets and _you’re_ the idiot who left his vibranium shield on Earth!” Bucky fished around in his belt pouch until his fingers closed on the hard, smooth surface of a sonic grenade. He pulled the pin, tossed it over the shuttle, and spat, “Three, two, one, _go,”_ making it to his feet just before the burst of vibration almost knocked him flat on his ass again. He reached for Steve to steady him, but Steve was already in motion, and Bucky’s attention was immediately taken up by the one alien soldier who hadn’t gone down for the count in the blast and was trying to stagger back to his feet, raising his weapon.

Bucky had a split second to decide whether to try to draw fire or to go on the attack, and the fact that the alien was shakily aiming the gun at Steve, and not at him, was the deciding factor. With a yell that would’ve made the Howling Commandos proud, he covered the distance between them, raising his fist and decking the alien soldier right in its center eye. The soldier staggered, and Bucky wrenched the gun out of his hand just as Steve grabbed him by the Kevlar strap on the back of his tac vest and hauled him aboard the shuttle.

“You couldn’t even follow your _own_ plan for fifteen seconds?” Steve shouted over the groan of hydraulics as the hatch began to raise itself into place.

“Hey, I was fine! You were the one who couldn’t give me two seconds to get back in the ship under my own power.” He raised the gun and fired around the blast door; the gun made an unimpressive _pew-pew-pew_ noise, but it delivered, flinging pellets of what looked like solid lava at the group of fresh soldiers who were racing toward them. As the hatch finished rising, he tossed the gun through the opening at the last second, then whipped around and slapped his palm on the bio-control panel. “Escape velocity,” he ordered, and the shuttle roared to life, catching more than one of the newcomers in the flare of its liftoff rocket before it shot straight up into the air, headed for the safety of the stratosphere.

As the view through the windshield faded from blue to indigo to star-flecked black, Bucky dropped to the floor of the shuttle, drew a deep, gasping breath, and started to laugh. “God! Did you see the base commander’s face when you decked him back there? Went down like a sack of potatoes. Which is especially funny because he kind of _looked_ like a sack of potatoes.”

“Are you laughing right now?” Steve demanded. “What were you thinking? You could’ve been killed!”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t. Besides, all the shit you’ve pulled in your lifetime, you’re really gonna lecture _me_ about sticking to the plan? Pal, you’ve been flying by the seat of your pants since 1943.”

Steve cracked a grin and flopped to the floor beside him. “I can’t believe,” he said, “that people actually buy it when you tell them you’re a cheese merchant.”

“I never say merchant,” Bucky huffed, mock-offended. “I say cheese _dealer._ Totally different thing. And you know that ninety-nine percent of what I transport is actually cheese, right? The best way to look legitimate is to _be_ legitimate when you can, you know.”

“So what’s the other one percent today?” Steve said, and Bucky raised his left hand, took hold of it with his right, and wrenched it until it clicked, the metal plates separating to allow him to pop the hand away from the wrist. “Does that hurt?” Steve asked, paling slightly, as Bucky smacked his forearm against the floor, trying to get the hidden data cube to fall out.

“Not really. Shuri’s been tinkering with it for years, and she’s got it to where I can have sensation in it but no actual pain. There we go,” Bucky said, slotting his metal hand back into place and picking up the data cube, a frosted glass square the size of his thumbnail. He reached up to slide it into the port on the shuttle’s dashboard, and there was a _beep,_ then a voice that said, “Data available. Access now?”

“Yes, access and transmit all data to Nova Prime,” Bucky said, settling back in on the floor beside Steve. “If I ever get caught someplace I’m not supposed to be—which I won’t—the Nova Corps will probably spring me out of prison. Well, they would anyway, because I’ve got enough dirt on them that they don’t want me sitting in an alien jail with a lot of time to think about where my loyalties lie. But being able to get them stuff like this is what really makes me valuable.”

“And what is _this,_ exactly?”

“If their contact was telling the truth, it’s proof of a scandal big enough to bring down half of the Kree Empire. Which is to say, negotiating leverage. Maybe enough that they can use it to stop the next war in this sector before it gets started. I try not to get mixed up in the politics too much—emergency food drops are one thing, blackmail’s another, you know?—but it’s like they used to say in the Cold War: sometimes one agent in the right place at the right time can do more than an army. And it feels good to be that agent for the good guys, for a change.”

“So what happens now?” Steve asked.

“Now? Once Nova Prime confirms the data’s transmitted, I destroy the cube, and in six weeks or so, a nice big untraceable deposit lands in my bank account. Hell, if they’re really feeling generous, it might be enough to repair the shuttle my stupid partner got all shot up _and_ pay what I owe to the swear jar.”

“I meant in the immediate future,” Steve clarified. “Is anybody likely to be coming after us now that we’re off the planet?”

“Oh, that? Nah, we’re fine. Quill got me some Ravager gear that jams tracking devices. Plus, chances are good the part of their government that fucked up and lost the data is gonna be more interested in covering it up than in going after a couple of small-time crooks. It sure is nice when the bad guys give karma an excuse to bite them in the ass. Anyway, the ship’s on autopilot, so we’ve got a couple hours to kill. Anything you want to do?”

Steve grinned. “Oh,” he said, “I’m sure we can think of something.”

“Oh my God, are you kidding me? I knew you liked danger and everything, but since when does it get you in the mood, Rogers?”

“It’s not the danger,” Steve said, laughing, reaching out for him. “It’s _you._ Besides, you can’t tell me you don’t like it at least a little bit. Otherwise, why are you still doing this instead of retiring comfortably on your cheese fortune?”

“Fortune my ass! I have three kids I gotta put through college, and Hela’s looking at Brown.”

“Come on, Buck. I know you. It’s not about the money.”

“No,” Bucky said, allowing himself to melt into Steve’s arms. “It’s not about the money. And unlike some thrill-seeking idiots I could name, it’s not because I like danger, either. I hate it. Every time I go out on one of these things, I think about what happens to my kids if I don’t come home. I mean, Nat and Shuri would make sure they were taken care of, but still. It’s just… I don’t like this part of the job, but I’m good at it. I’ve got skills most people don’t, and considering how I got them, I can’t let all that be for nothing. And, you know, sometimes I think no matter what I do, I can never really balance the scales. Hurting one person was too much. But I was damn lucky to get a second chance, and I want to give that same chance to other people.”

“It’s funny you say that,” said Steve. “When Dr. Erskine gave me the serum, he said he could offer me a chance. Only a chance. But sometimes a chance is enough.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agreed, leaning his head against Steve’s chest. “Sometimes it’s enough.”

 

Loki had been quiet in school for several days, speaking up in class only if he was called on and making sure nobody found an excuse to start trouble with him before he was ready. He was thinking hard, and his thoughts had headed off in an unaccustomed direction. It wasn’t that Steve had said anything that revolutionary, but there was something in the way he’d said it—in the way he sounded like he’d really, truly _lived_ it—that made it stick. So Loki watched, and he waited, and he noticed a couple of things he’d never really paid attention to before, such as the fact that he wasn’t the only kid whose classmates considered them small and weird and easy to bully. And sure, it was possible that standing up to the bullies and losing would make him an even easier target. But it might also make him something else. It might even make him a hero.

Okay, so maybe his motives were still a little selfish, but even Perfect Thor wasn’t perfect all the time. Loki’s heart might not be pure, but his logic was sound, and that was why, the next time he saw the mean kids ganging up around Tregan, he got up and walked across the playground to stand a short distance away from them. He didn’t do anything, because he wanted it to be crystal clear later that he _hadn’t_ done anything. So he stood there, waiting, until the biggest and meanest of the kids turned around. “Oh, great, it’s the weirdo,” he said. “What do you want, weirdo?”

“Hey, Konor,” Loki addressed him, as amiably as he could. “What are you guys doing?”

“None of your business, freak.” Konor narrowed his eyes. He was a Zehoberei, a big tough kid with green skin and a rich dad, which apparently meant he didn’t have to follow the same rules as anybody else—none of which would have bothered Loki in the slightest if Konor hadn’t marked him early on as an easy target. It wasn’t Loki’s first rodeo at being bullied; he _did_ stand out, because he _was_ small and weird and had an imagination that apparently filled up the part of his brain where other kids stored their abilities to “tone it down” and “fit in” and “think about _normal_ things” like sports and candy instead of cool, interesting ones like the Three Great Defenestrations of Xandar City. But most bullies were worse at being bullies than Konor, because Konor never made the mistake of picking on Loki in front of Thor. The kid seemed to have a genuine gift for it; whenever Loki got tripped or shoved, whenever a lunch tray got spilled on him or someone whispered _“freak”_ as he walked by, it was always when Thor was either elsewhere or distracted by a frog or something and not paying attention. Obviously, Loki didn’t _want_ stupid Thor sticking up for him, but he was willing to admit that there were times when it was useful.

Loki took a deep breath. Time to be a hero.

“See, it’s just that from over there, where I was, it kind of looked like you were picking on Tregan,” he said. “And if that was what you were doing, it would be wrong, because you shouldn’t pick on someone who’s smaller than you.”

Konor looked at Loki in disbelief for a moment. Then he drew himself up to his full height, which wouldn’t necessarily be impressive to everyone, but not everyone was as small as Loki. “Listen, you little freak,” he began, and then he stopped. “What are you smiling about?”

“Oh, I was just thinking about how you keep calling me the same things over and over,” Loki said. _“Little, weirdo,_ and _freak._ I mean, you learned three whole words for insulting people. Your mom must be so proud.”

“Okay, you li—” Konor paused, realizing he was about to prove Loki’s point, and Loki saw his opportunity and piped up, “Take all the time you need, Konor,” which, to Konor’s (very mild) credit, was only enough to make him step forward, right into Loki’s personal space, and stare into his eyes. “Hey,” he said. “You wanna talk tough when you don’t have the guts to back it up? We all know you’re just gonna run back behind your big brother.”

“Thor doesn’t look like he cares that much to me,” Loki observed. It was true; Thor was looking in the other direction, almost studiously not paying attention to them, just like Loki had asked him to. “Anyway, I think you’re the one who’s really scared. You pick on Tregan all the time because nobody’s gonna stand up for him, but you only pick on me when my brother’s not around. If you had any balls,” which was a conditional swear-jar word at home, but there was nobody here to enforce that rule, either, “you’d take a swing at me now, like you know you want to.”

Konor glanced at the friends on either side of him—kids who had actual names, but who Loki had been thinking of as Crabbe and Goyle as a small personal revenge ever since Dad had started reading them Harry Potter—and seemed to realize he was trapped, exactly as Loki had planned. “Come on,” he taunted. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Unlike Bucky, Loki had never given real thought to the concept of parallel universes, so it didn’t occur to him to wonder if another reality was spinning off into existence while Konor made his decision. But he did suspect there was a good chance Konor would just say something like “You’re not worth it” and walk away, which might be _objectively_ better but would definitely be a million times less satisfying. And that was why, in spite of everything, it was hard for Loki not to grin when he saw Konor’s fist coming toward his face.

 

When Bucky got to the school office, the first thing he did was drop to his knees in front of Thor and Loki, who were seated in a small waiting area outside the principal’s door, and start assessing the damage: Thor’s black eye and bloodied knuckles, Loki’s skinned knees and the blood on his shirt from a split lip. “Okay. You’re both gonna be okay,” he said, but Steve could see him struggling not to, as Sam would say, _lose his cool._ “What happened?”

“Hello, Bucky.” Steve hadn’t noticed the woman until she spoke up. She was one of the pink-skinned Xandarians, and she’d been seated quietly in a corner with a man who could have passed for an Earth human except for whatever the hell was going on with his eyebrows. “We’ve had an incident that—Who’s this?”

Bucky followed her gaze to Steve. “Co-parent,” he said brusquely. “Took your advice, Mx. Zaay. So maybe you can return the favor and tell me _what. The hell. Happened. To my children.”_

Zaay looked briefly heartbroken—or at least, that was what Steve took away from the way she bit her lip, then squared her shoulders—but before she could open her mouth, the other Xandarian stood. “Mr. Barnes,” he said, “I’m sorry to inform you that Thor and Loki are hereby expelled from this school.”

Thor jumped up with a howl. “What? But we didn’t do anyth—”

“Thor,” Bucky said softly, and that was when Steve realized just how bad it was. Bucky could be every shade of angry from sarcastic to livid and it would be okay. When Bucky got quiet, it meant he was simply shutting down, a state that reminded Steve entirely too much of the Winter Soldier. “We’ll sort this out at home. Let’s go.”

“Actually,” Steve said, stepping forward, “before we leave, I’d like to hear what Loki has to say about this.”

Every pair of eyes in the room turned toward him, and the man—Steve had him pegged as the local equivalent of the school principal now; he knew this breed of authority figure, and had never much cared for it—said, “Excuse me, Mx.—”

“Steve Rogers, he/him. Co-parent, as mentioned. And before my children get expelled, I’d like to hear the circumstances of this alleged fight from someone I trust to tell us exactly what happened, without hiding anything or embellishing anything. So, kiddo,” Steve said, fixing his eyes on Loki’s, “you’re up.”

The look that Loki gave Steve was half flat disbelief, half _okay, Rogers, your funeral._ “I saw Konor and his friends start picking on Tregan again,” he began. “So I went over and told them to stop it.”

“What?” Bucky said, looking up.

“Keep going,” Steve said.

Loki took a deep breath. “Well, I knew Konor wasn’t gonna stop just because I asked him,” he said, “so I thought maybe he could use a lesson about how actions have consequences. So I kind of told Konor that if he wanted to pick on somebody, he could pick on me, and when he tried to punch me—”

“Wait a fu—wait a darn minute,” Bucky said. “This other kid threw the first punch? So I assume he’s not here because you already got done expelling him, right?”

“Mr. Barnes—”

“So then,” Loki said, “what I did was, I did an illusion spell to make it look like I fell down and hit my head on the concrete and died.”

Steve blinked. “You did what now?”

“I was actually over by the swingset,” Loki explained. “I didn’t want him to really hit me or anything. But I thought if Konor saw what would happen if he really hurt somebody, maybe he’d think twice before he did it again. It was a really good spell,” Loki said. “I can show you. I put a _lot_ of blood in it.”

“You see?” The principal had taken a step closer to Steve, probably unconsciously, which was the only reason Steve didn’t choose to loom back at him. Being taller than almost everybody on this planet was a power to be used wisely. “This boy traumatizes the other children with his pranks, and then he lies about using ‘magic’ to do them—”

“My kids are Asgardians,” Bucky said, also standing up. Unlike Steve, he had no qualms about looming. “I told the school when I enrolled them that they might have some unusual abilities. So which is it? Did he do magic that supposedly traumatized the other kids, in which case there’s no reason to call him a liar, or did he not do it and there’s no problem?”

“Hang on,” said Steve. “If this Konor didn’t actually hit you, what’s with all the blood on your shirt?”

“Oh, that was an unintended consequence,” said Loki.

“I thought he was _dead!”_ Thor burst out.

“So he ran over and tackled Konor,” Loki explained. “And when I came out from behind the swingset and tried to pull him off Konor and show him I was fine, he kind of accidentally elbowed me in the face.”

“It’s your own fault! What was I supposed to do when I thought you were really dead for real?”

“Not fall for it, for one thing,” Loki said. “You know I do stuff like that all the time, right? And anyway, I didn’t think you’d care _that_ much.”

“Of _course_ I cared when I thought somebody hurt you!” Thor shouted, punching Loki in the shoulder.

“Ow!”

 _“Kids!”_ Bucky shouted, and that made both of them snap to attention. “Okay,” he said, after a deep breath. “I can see that we do have a lot to discuss here. The other kid, is he okay?”

“He’s traumatized,” the principal spat. “His parents are threatening to sue the school.”

“Wait a minute, this is Konor Draell, right? I know his dad,” Bucky said. “I can talk to him and get him to drop it, but only if we can all agree that expelling a kid who came clean about what happened isn’t the way to go. And certainly not expelling his brother for being upset when he thought his brother had just been murdered. Hell, I could sue the school for letting _my_ kid be traumatized too, you know.”

“That… does not make sense,” said the principal, but Steve could tell he was wavering.

“If I may,” Zaay said softly, “I’d like to propose another alternative.”

“We’re listening,” Steve said, because Bucky and Loki were both opening their mouths and he didn’t know which of them was going to come up with something worse.

“Bucky, when we talked about Loki in our conference, it got me thinking,” Zaay said, emboldened now. “Our system has a magnet school for the performing arts that takes students not much older than Loki. It’s a few hours from here, but that wouldn’t matter in your situation. If we held out until the end of the term, we could skip Loki ahead a grade and send him there after the semester break. He’s certainly got the intelligence, and I think he’d be a natural fit in terms of… sensibility. Plus, I think the coursework would challenge him enough to cut down on his, uh, side projects.”

“You wanna send him somewhere else?” Thor demanded, immediately distraught. “You can’t split us up! We’re twins! It’s a rule!”

“It’s not a rule, Thor. And I know you wouldn’t like it, but sometimes we have to make sacrifices to help our family.” Bucky turned to Loki. “What do you think, kiddo?”

It wasn’t really a question; Loki’s eyes were wide and eager. “I’d love that,” he said. “And I’m sorry, Thor, but I… everywhere we go, everybody compares me to you. And I never get to solve my own problems because you try to fix everything for me. Sometimes I just want something that’s just mine, you know? It’s not like we wouldn’t still be brothers.”

“I guess not,” Thor said, although he still looked somewhat shaken.

“There’s just one thing you’d need to promise me, though,” Loki added. “You have to stay here and look out for Tregan. Nobody else is gonna want to take a punch for him like I did—” Steve cleared his throat, and Loki amended, “Like I pretended I did, but also I bet nobody would mess with him if they thought you’d be as mad about that as you were about me.”

Thor’s look of abject misery abruptly started to lift. “You really care about him,” he said. “I knew you cared about other people besides yourself.”

“I wouldn’t say _that,”_ said Loki. “I just don’t want to give Konor the satisfaction, that’s all.”

“You can’t fool me. You’re a nice person,” Thor said, pulling Loki in for a sideways hug, which Loki attempted to bear with dignity.

Steve glanced at the principal. “You willing to back this up?” he asked, and, faced by entirely too many people to argue with, and obviously aware that the only person who might take his side was nine years old, the principal had very little chance but to nod. “But Loki is on probation for the rest of the year,” he added sharply. “Any more… magic… and the deal is off.”

“Good. Because let’s be clear, this isn’t a reward you’re getting, Loki,” Bucky said. “This is the grownups trying to do what’s best for you, and you can thank Mx. Zaay for having your back, and maybe think about that the next time you pull your whole ‘nobody cares about me’ routine, okay?” But he was working so hard at not smiling that his stern tone wasn’t fooling anyone.

“Thank you, Mx. Zaay,” Loki said quickly. “Dad, can you make Thor stop hugging me now? It’s embarrassing. And he’s cutting off my airflow.”

Loki was duly released, and Bucky held it together until they were back at the shuttle (“What _happened?”_ Thor asked; “This is why people shouldn’t leave shopping carts in parking lots,” Steve improvised), where he shooed the kids inside and leaned against the hull, exhausted. “You okay?” Steve asked. “You seemed like you were more freaked out in there than you were during the firefight.”

“Yeah, of course I was,” said Bucky. “That was war. This is _family._ When they started talking expulsion, I… I thought it meant I’d _really_ screwed up with the kids, Steve. Sometimes I can’t believe I ever thought I was up to the task of raising the three of them. I obviously dropped the ball on Loki over the last couple weeks. I mean, I don’t buy it for a minute that this was all about protecting a classmate he’s never shown the slightest interest in before, and I should’ve known things were bad enough to make him want to retaliate against this Konor kid.”

“Well, even if you weren’t already pretty damn busy, you don’t exactly have someone come back from the dead every day,” Steve pointed out. “So it’s partly my fault that you’ve had a lot on your mind. Once I get a little more settled in as your—what’d you call me, co-parent?—I can do more to help you, and you won’t be so outnumbered. And, you know, I may not like Loki’s motives _or_ his methods in this case, but he did get results. You’ve met Kamala Khan, right?” Kamala had joined his S.H.I.E.L.D. team after the Infinity War in his universe, but Steve had met this universe’s version at the Avengers headquarters, so he wasn’t surprised when Bucky nodded. “Does she say the same thing here that my universe’s Kamala told me?”

“‘Good is not a thing you are,’” Bucky quoted. “‘It’s a thing you do.’ Yeah, I guess that by that standard, Loki didn’t do so bad today. And once the other kids get over the fact that Loki fake-died a little too convincingly this time, they might actually accept him a little more, now that he’s stood up for one of them. That would be great; he could really use a few more friends his own age.”

“‘This time’?” Steve asked.

“Long story. I have to hand it to Zaay, though: she really came through for all of us back there. That magnet school thing was genius. I should send her something nice to thank her. Oh, shit, that reminds me.” He took out his communicator, tapped a number and a few words into it, and hit _send,_ and within a few seconds there was the beep of an incoming transmission. “Okay, good. The thing with Konor’s parents is smoothed over.”

“That quickly?”

“Yeah, I know Rhe Draell from way back. He’s not that hard to handle once you get to know him.”

“Please tell me you’re talking about blackmail material, and not about some kind of a sexual thing,” Steve said, paling. “I don’t care what you did while you thought I was dead, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear about it.”

“What? No, gross, I’d never fuck him, he’s a horrible person. I just bribed him with a case of Havarti I’ve been holding onto since my last Earth trip. The guy really likes his cheese. Although I can see how you’d be confused about this, Mr. I Assume Every Word I Don’t Know Means Fucking.”

“Christ, it’s been seventy-five years since the fondue thing, Buck. Are you ever gonna let it go?”

“Not a chance,” Bucky said, pulling Steve close. “I’m not saying I got into cheese smuggling because of you, but now that I am? You’re stuck with that one forever, babe.”

“A tragedy,” Steve said, and then his mouth was otherwise occupied for a while.

Then he opened his eyes and found himself looking straight at Thor and Loki.

 

“Well, shit,” said Loki, who was standing on the steps of the shuttle, and before Steve could even tell him to watch his language, he asked, “So how long has this been going on, then?” in such a painfully adult tone that neither Steve nor Bucky had the heart to call him on it. Steve looked at Bucky and Bucky looked at Steve, and Bucky said, “Okay,” and took each kid by one hand, leading them over to a nearby park bench and sitting them down. “So this isn’t how I wanted you to find out about Steve and me, but the truth is, the two of us are—”

“I have a request,” said Loki. “Dad, could you and Steve let Hela catch you kissing later so she thinks she’s the first one to find out?”

“What?” said Bucky.

“He’s right, Dad,” Thor agreed. “If Hela thinks she missed your first kiss with Steve, she’ll probably want to kill us both.”

“The first—what?” Bucky shook his head. “Okay, in the interests of full disclosure, I think you should know that not only was that not the first time we kissed since we’ve been back together, but the two of us have been—” He glanced at Steve helplessly. “What would you call us?”

“Partners,” Steve supplied.

“The kissing kind of partners,” Thor clarified.

“Sure,” Bucky agreed, “let’s go with that. We’ve been partners for a long time. I didn’t want you to think that we were...” He shot Steve a look that said, _Help._

“What your father is trying to say,” Steve said, “is that the two of us have been in love with each other since a long time before I came to your ship. Honestly, I’m glad it’s out. We didn’t tell you earlier because we didn’t want to throw too many changes at you all at once, but all the sneaking around was getting hard to take.”

“Sneaking around?” Thor asked.

“He means so they could kiss and stuff, Thor,” Loki said wearily. “I can’t believe we spent all that time trying to make them fall in love when they already _were_ so much in love that it’s gross. And I really _really_ can’t believe they’re so sneaky that we didn’t figure it out.”

“You were tr—” Bucky shook his head. _“Why?”_

“’Cause we wanted you to be happy, Dad,” said Thor. “Hela said you were lonely. That was why she did the— _ow!_  Loki, stop it!”

“Did the what?” Bucky asked sharply.

“Sorry, Dad,” Loki said, removing the foot that had just stomped on Thor’s. “It’s dangerously close to something we did a pinky swear about, and I know keeping promises is important to you.”

“Jesus. So you’re just both okay with this?”

“Why wouldn’t we be? We love Steve too,” Thor said, walking over to throw his arms around Steve’s waist. “Best co-parent ever.”

“Do they put that on a mug?” Steve asked, straight-faced. “If so, I want one.”

“What about the lady?” Loki demanded.

“Lady?”

“The lady in the picture in the thing,” Loki said, presumably under the mistaken belief that this clarified things. When Steve looked blank, he added, “The lady you drew the naked pictures of in your sketchbook.”

“When did you look at that?” Steve asked, his face turning pink.

“You didn’t tell me they were _naked_ pictures before,” Thor said accusingly.

“I’m also somewhat interested in these naked lady pictures,” Bucky said, neutrally.

Steve drew the compass out of his coat pocket. “You mean this lady?” he said, flipping it open to show them the picture.

“Oh,” Bucky said, visibly relieved. “You’re talking about _Peggy.”_

“You know about the lady, Dad?”

Bucky sat down on the bench, between the twins, so he could put an arm around each of them. “Yeah,” he said. “Peggy was a lady we both knew a long time ago, and she died way back before—well, longer than you’ve been alive, let’s put it that way. And I wasn’t upset that Steve was in love with her, or even if he still misses her and draws pictures of her because he wants to remember. The truth is, there was a part of me that loved her too.”

“You never told me that,” Steve said, voice choked.

“Well, back then there was a lot I was keeping my mouth shut about, pal. I really was okay with it, though. I mean, I would’ve preferred if you were with me, but since I couldn’t have you, at least you were with somebody who saw you the same way I did. Hell, maybe somewhere in the multiverse there was a world where I did have the guts to tell you about it, and maybe in that one my kids ended up with three parents somehow. The point is, kids, if you were worried about Peggy coming between us, don’t. Do you know what name Peggy is short for on Earth? It’s Margaret. And who else do you know who’s named Margaret?”

“Hela Margaret Odinsdottir Barnes?” Thor said, in awe.

“Bucky,” Steve said, eyes shining.

“Yeah, well, you know… In Catholic families you name your kids after a saint and in Jewish families you name ‘em after someone you loved who died, and when it came time for me to name my own kids, I figured I’d kind of combine those two.”

“Oh, so when you gave Loki my name as his middle name—”

“Yeah, yeah. They also sainted a dog once, Rogers, don’t get a big head about it.” Bucky looked at the twins. “One day soon, I promise I’m gonna tell you guys the whole story, but it’s a lot, and I want to think about how to explain it in a way that makes sense, and I’m really tired right now and I just want to go home, but if you have any questions that you need answers to right now…”

“How come you weren’t allowed to be in love with Steve?” Thor asked. “You said, if you couldn’t have him, you were glad the Peggy lady could. So how come you couldn’t have him?”

Bucky let out a long, slow breath. “Well,” he said, “back on Earth, at the time Steve and I were kids, most people were pretty horrified about the idea of two men falling in love with each other and getting married. In fact, they could actually arrest you and put you in jail for it.”

Both of the twins blinked. Then Loki said, “Well, that’s bullshit.”

 _“Language,”_ Steve said, before he realized that he’d probably introduced that phrase to Loki’s vocabulary.

“Sorry. It is, though, isn’t it? I mean, who cares, right? Like on some planets people don’t even _have_ genders, and on other planets there are like five, so who’d be stupid enough to think that would mean you couldn’t fall in love with somebody?”

“Yeah, that’s really really stupid,” Thor agreed. “If Dad can love _us_ even though we’re not even the same species as him, then why would it be weird if two guys got married to each other?”

“Buck?” Steve said. “You okay? Because I’m not really sure what your face is doing right now.”

“Yeah.” Bucky swiped the back of his metal hand across his eyes. “Yeah, I was just… You know how I was just saying that sometimes it feels like I did everything wrong with my kids?” He pulled both of them closer, and said, “I think I just got a confirmation that I did at least one thing really right.”

“I can see that,” Steve said. “I guess I was just mostly feeling glad I haven’t proposed to you yet, because what would Hela say if she missed _that?”_

“You’re gonna get _married?”_ Loki shrieked.

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “Your dad can’t say yes or no until I officially ask him. So what do you kids say we go find Hela, come clean to her about all this, and then we’ll sort that out?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “that’s okay with me,” and he laughed when the boys piled into the shuttle as if they could make it get home that much faster and settle this thing once and for all.

 

“Hela,” Bucky called, walking out of the shuttle bay and into the body of the _Mae West._ “Hela, where are you? Steve and I have something we wanna talk to you kids about. Hela! Helaaaaaa… Mae, can you find Hela for me and tell her to come in here?”

“Hela Barnes is not onboard the ship,” the _Mae_ ’s AI informed him.

“What? Is she not home from school yet? It’s… shit, school got out hours ago. Where is she?”

“Unknown,” said the _Mae._ “Hela Barnes arrived home at 1530 hours, accessed the teleporter at 1544 hours, and left the ship at 1545 hours.”

“What the hell,” Bucky said reflexively. “She knows she’s not allowed to go roaming around without permission. What coordinates did she teleport to?”

The _Mae_ told him.

“Fuck,” said Bucky, and started to run.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hector is getting too old for this shit.

Knowhere was a place that existed outside the normal rule of law and order, but that didn’t mean it didn’t have a set of rules it abided by, unwritten but just as strictly enforced: by social pressure, by displays of muscle, and occasionally by a knife between whatever set of ribs provided easiest access to a given species’ heart. 

Bucky Barnes was in the mood to break all of them.

The bar on the main concourse was called Bloody Varr’s, and it was run by a skinny, tentacle-y alien who had such a truly unpronounceable name by most other species’ standards that he just went by Hector. Hector might have looked unassuming, but he hadn’t survived serving intoxicating substances on Knowhere by luck; when Bucky kicked open the door, the first thing Hector did was nod to his bouncer and reach under the bar to grasp the loaded plasma cannon he kept there. He certainly couldn’t expect help from any of the patrons, because the rules on Knowhere were that you settled your own business. In fact, when Bucky strode across the room and brought his metal fist down on the bar top, most of the drinkers didn’t even bother to look up. 

“Barnes,” Hector said, frown lines appearing between all six of his eyes. “You look like you’re at about a nine, buddy, and if you wanna stay in my bar, you need to bring it down to a two.”

“Where’s Hela?” Bucky said, and that was when people started to look up from their drinks—and also when one of the more human-looking customers at a nearby table shifted his weight and started to sidle toward the door.

“Your  _ kid  _ Hela? I’m not stupid enough to serve her in here, we both know you’d kill me,” Hector said, truthfully. “I haven’t seen her since you and I did that deal for the gorgonzola. Why?”

“Somebody’s seen her,” Bucky said, his voice a low growl, and Hector started to slide the plasma cannon out of its harness—right up until Bucky whipped a knife out of his belt and buried the blade an inch deep in the counter. “She was in this part of the station less than two hours ago. She’s not here now, and somebody’s about to tell me exactly where she went in between.”

“What makes you think she was here?” Hector demanded, as forcefully as he could with a knife three inches away from his  _ very favorite  _ tentacle.

“Because the first thing I did when I got to this trash planet was hack the security feeds, ya dingus,” a voice spoke up behind Bucky. Hector leaned around him to look. He knew the guy, vaguely: short, brown, furry, looked like an Earth-based life form until you spotted the cybernetic implants under his fur. Liked big guns, like the one he was leveraging at Hector right now. Name was Rickett or something. “We watched her get snatched by some human-looking guy on the concourse right outside, which means Barnes is right, somebody in here knows  _ something.”  _

Out of the corner of his top right eye, Hector could see the shifty-looking Earth-human slinking around the edge of the bar, moving toward the door. When he made a break for it, Hector sighed and reached out one of his less-favorite tentacles (just in case Barnes took issue with the sudden movement) for the button that would bring the grate down over the door, but it turned out he didn’t need to bother. One of the largest, broadest humans Hector had ever seen had just stepped into the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. This one had yellowish keratin filaments instead of dark ones like Barnes’, and an expression like he was ready to stand in that doorway all day, and Hector, who usually didn’t go for beings with such a pathetically low number of limbs, had just enough time to think  _ if I had to pick a human  _ before the new guy’s arm shot out and grabbed the fleeing one by the throat.

“Wouldn’t try it if I were you, son,” he said, plucking a small gun out of the shifty one’s hand.

“I am Groot,” said a small voice behind him, and Hector sighed, because the Great Guiding Principle of the Universe had to be  _ kidding  _ him with this. Earth mammalians up in his business were one thing, but there were some creatures in the universe he’d seen before and never wanted to see again. Hector had no intention of ending up like Varr had, and if Groots were going to start walking into his bar now, maybe it was time to sell the place and get out of this business for good.

 

Hela had never been on Knowhere alone before, but she was pretty sure she could handle anything it had to throw at her. She was fourteen, which was practically an adult, and Dad had taken her along loads of times when he went there on business, so she knew half the shopkeepers (and bookies and bouncers and general thugs-for-hire) by name. She wasn’t dumb, so after she got Dad’s video message that he and Steve were going to be held up at the boys’ school for a couple of hours, she changed into her spikiest jacket and tallest shoes, added a little makeup to make herself look older and fiercer than she actually was, and made sure she had a full charge on both her communicator and the taser Aunt Darcy had given her for her eleventh birthday. But she didn’t expect to need either; she expected to be in and out, and not even in a particularly bad part of the station. After all, she was just going shopping. 

She found all the things she needed, too, because importing stuff from Earth was trendy these days. Her father liked to take credit for starting the fad, but really, Hela knew people had just gotten interested in the weird little backwater planet after it played an important role in the Infinity War, and the fact that Earth people were still pretty gun-shy about aliens made it hard for nonhumans to buy stuff from them, hence Dad’s entire business model. So yeah, it cost her a ridiculous amount of the allowance and chore money she’d been saving, but she got everything on her list: chocolate, strawberries, and a bottle of champagne (which Dad surprised everybody by being kind of snobby about because he’d been to real, actual France); long white taper candles to put on the rarely-used dining room table; some little twinkly lights to string up around the ceiling like tiny stars; and the ultimate  _ pièce de résistance, _ a dozen red roses that had been flash-frozen for the trip to space, but would thaw perfectly in an hour or two. Sure, she probably could have gotten similar things a lot cheaper in Xandar City, but Dad said that things that didn’t come from Earth weren’t really the same. And if she was going to give Dad and Steve the most romantic night of their lives, she wanted it to be absolutely perfect.

She was so satisfied with her purchases that she  _ maybe  _ got a little more distracted than she should have with riffling through her bags while she walked back toward the middle of the station to pick up a teleport signal. But she  _ wasn’t  _ too distracted to pick up on the guy who started following her on the main concourse, and she slipped her hand into her pocket and closed it around her taser before she turned around to confront him.

The problem was that he pressed the button on his own handheld shocking device before she could bring hers up to aim it at him.

Aunt Darcy had warned her that even Asgardians were susceptible to electric shocks (“so you should never taser your brothers unless they really deserve it”), but Hela had never experienced pain like this before, and she was completely unprepared for it. She didn’t even realize she was on the floor until the stranger grabbed her by the collar and slapped a pair of restraints around her wrists. “Dad!” she screamed, and that was the last thing she remembered before she passed out.

 

Bucky didn’t bother with anything creative when he interrogated the kidnapper, no threatening him on a rooftop or anything like that. He simply sat down in front of the chair where Rocket had tied the guy up and explained, in a calm and factual tone, which body part the kidnapper was going to lose for every subsequent minute in which he wasn’t told the exact whereabouts of his daughter. Apparently the Winter Soldier’s reputation preceded him, because the man folded like a cheap suit before Bucky told him about minute six. And once he had what he needed, Bucky also didn’t bother with any of the warnings or other bullshit that usually happened after a guy broke under torture; he just threw the guy onto the nearest teleporter pad, chose a random set of coordinates from the machine’s history, and hit the  _ go  _ button, which would probably take him somewhere with a breathable atmosphere and nothing that would immediately try to eat him. Probably.

“Rocket, I need to borrow your ship,” he said, when he re-materialized in the  _ Mae _ ’s kitchen, already moving toward the flip-up table where the weapons were hidden. “Steve, I need you to watch the boys while I’m gone. And if…” His pause only lasted for a second, but even that was more than he had to spare. “If anything happens to me, get in touch with Shuri. She knows what to do.”

“Whoa,  _ whoa,  _ Buck, hold on a minute,” Steve said, stepping between him and the table and setting his jaw in the way that meant arguing with him was a waste of time. “You’re crazy if you think I’m letting you go alone. You need backup. Rocket can watch the kids.”

“What, you think I’m gonna sit this one out?” Rocket demanded. “Even if I was gonna let you take my ship outta my sight, it’d be worth following Barnes around just to loot the corpses.” Four sets of eyes—minus Bucky, who’d taken the opportunity to slip past Steve and start loading up on gear from the weapon rack—turned to stare at him, and he said, “What, so it’s okay when Barnes pulls that ‘I got mouths to feed’ bullshit, but not me? Do you  _ know  _ how many krutacking new video games I’m gonna have to buy Groot this year? Look, I can’t believe I’m sayin’ this, but of course I care about your kid, Barnes, and I’d help you even if it hadn’t been way too long since I’ve gotten to lay down a good ass-kicking. Is that what you all wanted to hear?”

“We’re going too,” said Loki.

That one got Bucky’s attention. “The hell you are,” he said. “You’re _nine!”_

“Yeah, I know. We’re just little kids,” Loki said, drawing himself up to his full height, which wasn’t much to speak of, and looking straight into Bucky’s eyes. “But we’re Asgardian little kids, and even if we weren’t, it’s  _ Hela,  _ Dad. If you try to stop us, we’ll just wait till whoever you put in charge of us isn’t looking and then figure out how to go anyway.”

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” said Bucky.

“That has been…  _ many _ swear-jar words,” Thor said, in the tone of someone who wasn’t really expecting a response but still felt morally obliged to point it out.

“You’re the one who taught us that honesty is the best policy,” Loki said, in a tone that avoided being smug by an extremely narrow margin. “I can help and Thor has a _ magic hammer,  _ Dad. You know this is the right thing to do.”

“We’re wasting time,” Steve said. “Bucky, it’s your mission. Make the call.”

“You can’t seriously be entertaining this idea, Rogers! These are  _ literal children  _ we’re talking about!”

“What would you do if it was your sister, Dad?” Thor asked quietly.

There was a long, quiet moment. Then Bucky said, “Sarah Rogers give me strength, I don’t know why I even try anymore. Okay, whatever gear you’ve all got, go suit up. Anybody who isn’t back here in fifteen minutes, I’m leaving without you. Otherwise… Let’s go get our family back.”

Loki was the last to leave the kitchen, but he made sure he kept his face turned away from Bucky, because at that moment, not even his best illusion could have hidden his smile. Finally, he was going to be allowed to have some  _ real  _ fun. Very quietly, and mostly to himself, he whispered, “Avengers, assemble.”

 

Hela woke up in a bed, but she knew something was wrong before she opened her eyes. Everything normal was missing: Clint Barkton snuggled up against her, her brothers’ voices and pounding feet running up and down the hallway, the smell of coffee and whatever Dad had baked overnight for breakfast. It came back to her all of a sudden, what had happened, and she tried to do what people in movies did, which was lie very still and pretend she was still asleep until she got her bearings, even though that never worked in movies either.

“I know you’re awake, Hela Barnes,” a voice said, so that was also a thing that happened in real life. Hela opened her eyes, wincing. Her whole body still ached from the electric shock, and everything seemed too bright. She was lying on a bed, but she was in a closed room with walls that looked like they were actually made out of stone, like an old castle or something. When she realized that, she jumped up and ran to the room’s small, square window; it was high up, and set deep into a thick wall, so her view outside was bordered by stone on all sides even when she stood on tiptoe and pressed her face against the glass. It took her brain a minute to make sense of what she was seeing: snow-capped mountains on all sides, thickly forested on the lower slopes, and wisps of something floating in the air. Clouds. They were in a castle so high up that they were on a level with the clouds.

But most importantly, she was almost entirely sure they were on Earth. And if that was true, then Dad would find her… wouldn’t he?

Hela turned around. The voice that had spoken to her had sounded tinny, slightly mechanical, so she wasn’t surprised to see a speaker set in the wall, near a wooden door with metal strips across it just like in a movie. She  _ was  _ a little surprised to see that beside the speaker was a projector, which was showing her a hologram: a tall man in weird metal-accented clothes that would have fit in on any number of planets but were positively weird on Earth, with a green cape wrapped over them, and sharp eyes studying her from behind a gleaming silver mask.

“Hela Barnes,” the projection told her, “kneel before Doom.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PERIL! But everything is going to be fine, I promise.
> 
> (I did not, as I hoped, get this fic all the way written before I saw Endgame.)


	12. Chapter 12

“I’m sorry, kneel before who?”

Hela said it as politely as she could, because for once, she really wasn’t trying to be a smartass. She just didn’t know where to start, and apparently she wasn’t the only one. It was hard to tell what was going on under the metal mask, but they way the man in the hologram paused, shoulders back, she thought he looked surprised. Apparently he decided to soldier on, because he drew himself up and said, “Tremble in the presence of the sovereign ruler of Latveria, Victor von Doom!”

“Oh, okay,” Hela said, although that wasn’t really any less confusing. “Latveria. That’s on Earth, right? I mean, if there’s a planet called Latveria, I haven’t heard of it. Is your last name really von Doom? Because that’s… that’s actually kind of awesome.”

Doom, if that was his real name, cocked his head at Hela, definitely looking puzzled now. “What are you?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Hela said, although she was starting to get a sinking feeling that she did. “I’m a kid.”

“So it would appear.” Presumably, if he was projecting a hologram into the room instead of coming in to look at her, he was also watching her through a camera or something— _ew_ —but the hologram took a step closer and bent down as if it was really looking at her, which was way more unnerving than the whole “kneel” speech. “But you’re much more than that, aren’t you? I knew you weren’t human, but your magical energy is off the scale. And Latveria has a _significant_ scale for these things.”

Hela narrowed her eyes. “Are you a wizard?” she asked. If he was, neither Wong nor Aunt Wanda had ever mentioned him. Doctor Steven might have, but Hela tended to stop listening when Doctor Steven got off on a tangent.

“Some have called me that,” said Doom. “Others call me a man of science. I prefer to think of myself as both, and neither. Mages and mystics tend to be ruled by fear, while scientists reject that which is difficult to quantify. Doom has no need to limit himself in these ways.”

_And people who talk about themselves in the third person are just flat-out crazy,_ Hela thought, but she didn’t say it. “It sounds like you don’t have a lot of friends,” she said.

“Doom does not require friends.”

“That’s what somebody with no friends would say.” Hela took a step closer—just to the hologram, so there was no real risk, but she’d seen Dad pull the same move when he wanted to prove he wasn’t intimidated. “You know my dad’s gonna come after me, right?”

“Precisely as intended, child. Latveria has a score to settle with your father, but you have no reason to be afraid. Doom has no intention of harming you.” ( _Yeah, that wasn’t the part I was worried about,_ Hela thought, but she bit her tongue on that, too.) “Still, my sources led me to believe I’d be dealing with a human child—and you, Hela Barnes, are clearly anything but.” Doom did the look again, his eyes dark behind the slits of the metal mask. “If your power were to be extracted, harnessed, Latveria could go from an insignificant nation to the greatest power this planet has ever seen. I don’t suppose you’d consider joining me of your own free will? It goes without saying that you’d never be ordered to eat vegetables or go to bed on time again.”

“Sorry,” said Hela, although she did feel a brief spike of relief that Doom had gotten her and not, for example, Loki. “I just want to go home. But I’ll make you a deal: if you give me my phone and let me call my dad to come get me, I can _probably_ convince him and his friends not to kill you.”

Doom gave a short laugh. “Let me, in turn, counter your counter-proposal,” he said. “Tell me where your power comes from, and I’ll let you out of that room so we can speak more openly.”

A flood of images poured into Hela’s brain at that. If Doom let her out of this tiny locked room and brought her face to face with him, she’d be in the same room as someone who wanted to hurt her father for some reason—and who seemed perfectly fine with the fact that he’d had her tased, kidnapped, and dragged halfway across the galaxy. Someone who could do that was definitely a bad person, which would mean it would technically be okay to use magic to stop him. And in spite of all her discussions with Dad and Aunt Wanda about it, now that Hela was confronted with the idea of using her powers on a real, living person, well… how did she know she’d be able to stop?

Trying to channel Loki’s ability to lie to adults with utter conviction, Hela said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any powers. I’m just a _kid.”_

God, she wished he’d take the mask off, even for a second. It was so hard to talk to him when she was wondering what was underneath it. But she quickly discovered that she didn’t need to see Doom’s face to know that playing dumb was a useless tactic. “You present a pretty puzzle, Hela Barnes,” he said. “But rest assured, Doom will solve it.” Then the hologram started to dissolve, and she realized she was about to be left alone.

“Hey!” she shouted, before it shut off entirely. “You can’t just leave me in here! What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“The chamber pot should be more than sufficient.”

“Oh my God, _ew!”_ Hela shrieked. “You want me to go in here where you can _watch_ me?”

“Of course not,” said Doom. “There’s a privacy screen in the corner. Doom is not a pervert.”

“Yeah, you really deserve a medal for _kidnapping_ me and then not watching me pee,” Hela said, but the hologram had already flickered out.

Well. Getting abducted and locked up in a medieval castle sure had sounded a lot more interesting when it was happening to a fictional werewolf, and not a real person with a real bladder. Hela checked behind the screen, just in case he’d been lying and there was actually a door to a bathroom or something, but of course there wasn’t. There was, however, the thing she assumed had to be the fabled chamber pot, and she sighed. She hoped it wouldn’t be too long before she got rescued, because the urge to murder Victor von Doom was getting stronger by the second.

 

Bucky was quiet on the ride to Earth, sitting still as a statue in the back of the ship with his metal hand locked on his gun barrel, leaving Rocket to handle details like flying the ship and calling Shuri to arrange for flight clearances so the ship wouldn’t be blown out of the sky before they could notify Earth that they were only hostile toward a small fraction of it. Steve figured that left him in charge of the kids. In addition to Mjolnir, Thor had grabbed as much of his sports gear as he could carry, so Steve suited them up in what looked like some kind of Xandarian cross between hockey and lacrosse pads, Thor in his current gear and Loki in his last year’s castoffs. (“I look ridiculous,” Loki grumbled, pushing a brightly colored rugby helmet back so he could glower from underneath it, and Steve bit his tongue instead of suggesting that maybe Loki would prefer something with horns; he didn’t actually intend to let either of them get into a combat situation if he could help it, but God forbid he couldn’t keep them _out_ of it, the last thing he wanted was for one of them to get concussed for the sake of personal style). So the trip was nearly over by the time he got a chance to sit down next to Bucky and put a hand on his right arm. “You gonna be okay?” he asked softly.

“Depends on if Hela’s okay,” Bucky said, matching his low tone.

“I don’t have to tell you this isn’t your fault,” Steve said.

“And I don’t have to tell _you_ that it might not be my fault she broke the rules and went to Knowhere alone, or that kids grow up and you can’t protect them forever, but it _is_ because of me that she even had the chance to be there in the first place. Not to mention I’m the one who pissed off von Doom without realizing he was the kind of lunatic who might come after my kids.” Bucky shuddered. “Steve, if anything happens to her—”

“Nothing will,” Steve said. “We’re going to make sure of it. And even if we weren’t, you and Natasha and a lot of other people have been training Hela for this her whole life. She can handle herself.”

“That’s the point,” Bucky said, and Steve knew, without looking at him, that he was dangerously close to breaking. “I never wanted her to _have_ to.”

Steve could have said any number of things to that, but most of them would have fallen flat, and the rest would have only made it worse. He interlaced his fingers with Bucky’s and squeezed them instead, just enough pressure to let him know he was there.

“We’re here,” Rocket said, and Bucky stood up and walked purposely toward the front of the ship. Steve wasn’t exactly surprised, but he stiffened his shoulders and made sure he kept his face carefully expressionless, because the eyes were still Bucky’s—for now—but that walk was all Winter Soldier.

 

“DOOM!” Bucky’s voice thundered over the loudspeaker. Rocket was estimating that probably half of Latveria could hear it, because he’d set it up that way on purpose; when he told people to drop the goods and put their hands up from inside his spaceship, he wanted it to be a krutacking unambivalent statement. “It’s not too late to fix this. Bring me my daughter and nobody has to get hurt.”

“Jeez, cliché much?” Rocket muttered, but he kept it well under his breath. This was one of those rare times when pissing off somebody who was bigger than him wasn’t worth the satisfaction. Rocket wasn’t the type to get chills down his spine and all that crap, but the look on Barnes’s face... He turned his attention back to the case of grenades, snatching one out of Groot’s grasp and shoving it into his backpack. “Hey! What’d I tell you about touching other people’s stuff?”

“I am Groot.”

“Yeah, show me you can behave responsibly for five minutes and _maybe_ we’ll talk about it. Anything, Barnesy?” he called toward the front of the ship, but he didn’t expect an answer, and Barnes didn’t bother. All his attention was on the castle—seriously, what kind of lunatic lived in a _castle_ these days?—and apparently his patience, which was never real great to begin with, had just run out. He just scary-walked his ass over to the bay door, pressed the release button, and looked down, eyeing the distance.

“Aw, yes,” Loki whispered, nudging Thor. “He’s gonna do a superhero landing.”

“Bucky!” Rogers said, but Barnes had already jumped.

“You know, I coulda landed the ship if anybody’d bothered to _ask_ me,” Rocket began, but Rogers had already said, “Shit,” and jumped down after him.

“Oh, hell, no,” Rocket said, grabbing tiny Thor by the scruff of the neck as he was heading toward the opening, bulked out in his baby armor, magic hammer in hand. “Anybody who ain’t legal to drink in at least one galactic sector is keeping their hands and feet inside the vehicle until the ride has come to a complete stop.”

“But—” Thor began.

“I will turn this spaceship around, young man.”

Thor’s face fell. “Please, Mr. Rabbit, sir,” he said, “will you put the ship down so we can go fight some bad guys with our dads, please?”

Rocket sighed. “Yeah, yeah, keep your pants on, kid,” he said, but he went back to the captain’s seat and got ready to bring the ship in for a gentle landing. Of all the things Barnes and Rogers were gonna need forgiving for after this outing, the one that had just shot to the top of Rocket’s list was the fact that _he_ was somehow the designated grown-up.

 

Hela was bored to tears.

She might be only fourteen, but she understood what Doom was up to, and she had to admit, it was pretty smart of him. If he’d actually tried to torture her or something, it would’ve just made her determined to stay strong and keep her mouth shut. Instead, he was taking the patient route: leaving her locked up alone for what felt like forever in the hopes she’d try to use her power to escape, and in doing so, show him what her powers were and how much control she had over them. Needless to say, it was critically important that she couldn’t fall for it. But it was _so_ much easier said than done when you were fourteen and you were in a room that was literally empty except for a bed, a table with a pitcher of water and a single glass, and, of course, the chamber pot.

It had never occurred to her before how hard it would be not to know how much time was passing. She couldn’t see the sun through the little window, so she didn’t know it was getting on toward evening until the patch of sky and forest she could see started to get dark. Even then, she didn’t know what time nightfall was here, or what time she’d woken up, or how long before that she’d been brought to Latveria. But surely Dad should have figured out where she’d been taken by now, and he should be coming after her, right? And the trip to Earth only took a couple of hours, so he should be here any minute, right? _Right?_

She walked around the room until she got tired, but lying on the bed, she discovered that she couldn’t make herself sleep—not when she knew about the cameras in the walls and the creepy Doom hologram that might pop back up at any second. So she walked around, and did jumping jacks, and went through as much as she could remember of Aunt Pepper’s yoga routine until she was bored with that too. She hummed every song she could remember, even the ones she didn’t like. She counted the stone blocks in the walls of the little room, lost her place at eighty-two, tried again, only got up to sixty-three, and couldn’t face starting over a third time. And that left her with nothing to do but flop on the bed, stare at the ceiling, and try not to think about creative ways to kill people—which was distressingly easy for Hela at the best of times, and now it was downright alarming how many ideas were coming into her head.

She peed four times out of sheer boredom.

By the time anything did actually happen, she’d been in the room for so long that she wondered if she was hallucinating it. What happened first was that the room got a little darker, as if something was blocking the small amount of moonlight that came through the tiny window. Assuming it was just clouds, she didn’t bother getting up, only then she started to hear something, and the sound gradually got too loud to ignore. Afraid to let herself hope, Hela peered outside, then made an agonized noise at nobody and pounded her fist on the wall in frustration when she realized the window was too small and the angle was all wrong for her to see what was happening. And then she heard something else. The walls of the castle were too thick for her to make out all the words—she definitely heard, “Doom!” and she thought she heard “daughter”—but what was important was that it was her father’s voice.

“You see that?” she yelled, turning in the direction the hologram had come from, which, she assumed, meant she was facing the cameras. “You see that, you bucket-headed moron? That’s my dad, and he’s coming to rescue me, just like I said he would! You are in _so much trouble!”_

She wasn’t expecting an answer, so she took a startled step back when the hologram flared to life, inches in front of her. Doom was still wearing the mask, but from the way his eyes crinkled behind it, she could see that he was smiling. “Yes, child,” he said, and something about his voice made her stomach drop. “Your father is here. It’s a pity the room won’t afford you a better view of what’s about to happen to him, but perhaps this will suffice.”

And suddenly the hologram changed. Instead of Doom, it started showing her the outside of the castle, where a spaceship was hovering just above the walls. She recognized it as Dad’s friend’s ship, which made sense, because it was smaller and faster than the _Mae._ And there was Dad right now, jumping down onto the ramparts; he was coming to rescue her and nothing was going to stand in his way. Any pleasure she might have felt about that, though, vanished when she saw what else was happening. Because wooden doors were opening in the little guard towers that dotted the roofline, and human-shaped figures were pouring out. At first, she thought they were people dressed in silver armor and green capes like Doom’s, and even wearing silver masks like his, but then she realized that they weren’t people at all. They were gleaming metal robots, and most of their arms ended in big silver fists, but a few, terribly, were capped with what looked like guns, or maybe even laser cannons. And they were starting to rise up from the ground like they had jetpacks. Doom had built robots that could _fly._

Any other day, Hela would have said something like, “Cooooool,” and jumped at the chance to see robots in action that had been built by someone who knew what they were doing, instead of by the other kids in her school’s stupid little robotics club. But what made it horrifying was that the flying robots were converging on the place where her dad was standing, with only one gun in his hands and almost no armor at all.

It all fell into place with dizzying speed, and she couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t seen it before. Because Doom had _told_ her, hadn’t he? He’d wanted her dad to come here to rescue her before he knew she was magical at all, and she was only an afterthought. Sure, Doom would take her too—the kind of person who built killer robots with gun hands was the kind of person who’d be delighted to have a chance to take a death goddess apart and see how she worked—but at the end of the day, she’d only been the bait. Doom had laid a trap for her dad, and it was a hundred percent her fault that he was walking right into it.

Hela took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and fought back the tears that desperately wanted to fall. All she’d wanted was to make her dad happy. All she’d _ever_ wanted was to make her dad happy. And in a terrible irony, the only way to save the dad she loved was to let herself give in to the demands of the birth father she’d loved and hated in equal measure.

Hela opened her eyes, and a sword she’d summoned out of nothing fell into the palm of her left hand. She held her right hand out in front of her, and a spike of dark magic shot from her fingers through the door lock, shattering it. The door opened at her touch after that, and she stepped out into a long stone hallway, where four of the robots immediately turned their metal faces toward her.

“You wanted to see my magic, Doom?” she said. “Just remember that you asked for this,” and then the robots started clanking toward her and the fight was on.

 

Bucky was getting the shit kicked out of him.

Yes, obviously he’d known that this was a trap, and the whole point had been to go in and spring it. And yes, he’d known that Doom was the kind of nutjob who could not only think the phrase “maybe I should build an army of killer robots” with a straight face, but who would then proceed to up and do it. This, though… This was starting to look like the guy had Red Skull levels of crazy.

They’d fought their way down a set of narrow stone stairs and into an open courtyard, but there must have been literally hundreds of Doombots on the ground, and it looked like Doom was prepared to sacrifice every one of them to bring Bucky in. Every time he thought he was making headway, Doom would unleash another wave They didn’t fall to sprays of bullets like human soldiers; he had to focus and aim at a kill spot on each one, and before long, they had him crowded in too tightly to use his gun at all. That left him the arm, which was still a damn fine weapon in its own right, and at first he was taking down a Doombot with every punch—but while a metal arm couldn’t get tired, the musculature holding it up sure as hell could. Bucky’s back and shoulder were screaming, and he was losing power with every blow he struck. Now it was taking two punches to disable a ‘bot; soon it would be three, and at that point, they were going to overwhelm him. Behind him, he could hear Steve panting; the last time Bucky had gotten a glimpse of him, his knuckles had been raw and bloody, and he’d resorted to hitting a Doombot with pieces of a different Doombot, which was never a good sign.

And then he heard Thor scream, “Help!”

Bucky whipped around so quickly that his fist nearly sheared the head off the two Doombots closest to him. Thor was standing at the far end of the courtyard, looking pitifully outclassed, a child dressed for after-school sports instead of a battlefield. But Bucky’s eyes went immediately to Loki, who was leaning against Thor, with his pale skin standing out in sharp contrast to the dark red blood that was dripping down his face.

“Get help,” Thor wailed. “My brother is dying.”

Bucky didn’t even pause to draw another breath. He spun, grabbing the nearest Doombot by what passed for its throat and slamming it into two more that were standing between him and his children. He shouldn’t have bothered. The Doombots must have been programmed not to harm civilians, and before they could do more than turn and whirr awkwardly at a situation they had no frame of reference for, Thor picked Loki up—Christ, he’d known the kid was strong, but not that strong—and _threw_ him at a group of Doombots to his left. In almost the same moment, he held out his hand, gripped the hammer that was flying toward him, and spun himself through the air at the larger group of Doombots to his right. Thor was small, but Mjolnir was still Mjolnir; when it struck the ground, the courtyard shook so hard that it sent a ripple under Bucky’s boots, and nearly all of the Doombots that weren’t felled by the blow abruptly froze in place, then crackled under a burst of electricity, collapsing in a shower of sparks.

Bucky didn’t have to look to Steve; the two of them had been doing this so long that by now they could practically strategize by telepathy. Steve would know to go to Thor’s rescue, so Bucky went to Loki’s, punching his way through the handful of still-functional Doombots before most of them had even started to get back on their feet. It didn’t take long for him to reach Loki, but those couple of seconds were among the longest of Bucky’s life.

And of course, when he got there, Loki was picking himself up off the ground and loudly declaring, “That was the worst idea I’ve ever had in my life.”

“Lokes—” Bucky grabbed him, hugging him so tightly that he squirmed in Bucky’s metal-armed grip. The blood had vanished, but Bucky was pretty sure his heart was never going to be the same. “How many times do I have to tell you, you need to _warn_ me before you do something like that?”

“Well, I’m not doing it again,” Loki said, with deeply wounded dignity. “I thought it’d be fun, but it was just humiliating.”

“Get behind me,” Bucky said, setting Loki down. One last robot was shuffling toward them, and pure adrenaline gave him the burst of energy he needed to grab its stupid green cloak in his right hand and rip its head off its shoulders with his left. After that, the courtyard was clear; no Doombots were left standing, and Rocket was walking around to each of the fallen, giving it a kick and, if it twitched, firing his plasma gun into its silicon brain before proceeding to the next one. Groot had already descended on one of the downed ’bots and torn its chest cavity open, pulling out an array of multicolored wires that he was gleefully unspooling across the flagstones. And Thor was gripping Steve with the hand that wasn’t holding Mjolnir, and grinning. “Dad!” he said, rushing over to Bucky. “I did really good, didn’t I?”

“Yes, and you’re never doing it again,” Steve said. “Goddammit, Rocket, I told you to keep them away from the fighting.”

“Whaddaya think I was trying to do, Rogers? Have you _met_ these children?”

Bucky closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Now that Thor in particular had gotten a taste of victory, he was going to have to both lay down some very strict rules about future engagements, or else it was gonna be nine-year-old Steve all over again. “You did great,” he told the twins, “even if I do wish you hadn’t had to. And I’ll be really proud of you later, but right now, we have to find Hela.”

Both of them snapped to attention, as if they’d been so caught up in the adventure that they’d forgotten it was a rescue mission, and Thor looked like he was going to rush off immediately until Steve grabbed him by the collar. Yeah, Steve, who could try to keep civilians out of the fight all day but who, by the look of him, still hadn’t learned in howeverthefuck many years that it wasn’t the greatest idea to throw his own body into a fight face-first. Those fresh scrapes and bruises were a completely unnecessary reminder that he’d just gotten Steve back and he could have lost him _again,_ and the fact that neither of the kids had a scratch on them was cold comfort when all he could think about was how easily they could’ve been seriously hurt or worse. The core of ice inside Bucky’s chest, the deep cold place he’d been desperately trying to ignore since Hela had been taken, was expanding by the second.

When he walked into Doom’s throne room, it exploded.

Doom was sitting on his throne, the metal mask making his face impossible to read, but his posture didn’t look like that of a person who was slumped in despair, having just wasted his entire store of killer robots on a couple of guys, a couple of kids, a furry mammal, and a talking tree. Bucky didn’t stop to think, just crossed the room in a few quick strides and bounded up the stairs to the dais. _“ <Where is she?>”  _he demanded, switching over to Latverian with hardly a second thought. He reached under the mask, locking his fingers onto the pulse points at either side of Doom’s throat. _“ <Where’s Hela?>” _

That was when he heard the rusty, scratching sound emanating from under Doom’s mask. It sounded like… it sounded like he was _laughing._

_“ <You think you’ve won, Barnes?>”  _he said. _“ <You think you’ve defeated Doom by destroying a handful of robots? I still hold every card that matters, Soldier, because I have your daughter. Harm me, and I’ve made sure you’ll never see her again.>” _

_“ <We’ll see about that>,”  _Bucky said coldly, raising his left arm for a mask-shattering, and hopefully jaw-shattering, punch. It was agonizing, but the pain was nothing more than background noise in his head. The blood was pounding in his ears with every heartbeat. This man had taken his daughter, and the Soldier was going to make him pay. The Soldier was going to—

“Dad?” Hela said, behind him.

Bucky turned, and in a heartbeat he forgot about Doom completely; he released his grip without even being aware he was doing it, unable to do anything but stare. Hela was floating a foot off the ground, surrounded by a green glow of magic, almost unrecognizable as the little girl he’d walked to school on her first day so she wouldn’t get lost and tucked into bed at night. Her clothes had been replaced with deep black armor, her hair swept back and spiked out into a strangely crown-like shape around her head. The way the older Thor had described his adult sister, Bucky had envisioned her as a monster out of a fairy tale, something between the Angel of Death from the Passover story and Maleficent from _Sleeping Beauty_ (who was still fucking terrifying even if he had seen that movie for the first time as a grown-ass adult, and he didn’t care what snarky thing Sam had to say about it). But the Hela he saw in front of him now, giving him just a glimpse of the amazing woman she was going to grow up to be—well, there was nothing wrong or monstrous about her at all. In fact, she was just about the most amazing thing he’d ever seen in his long and varied life.

Then she dropped to the floor and ran toward him and she wasn’t a death goddess at all anymore, just a skinny middle-school kid in a tattered green sweater and black leggings, hair flopping down into its usual shoulder-length style with the bangs long overdue for a trim. “Dad,” she said again, burying her face in his shoulder as he locked both arms around her. “Daddy, I’m so sorry.”

“Shh, sweetheart, it’s okay,” Bucky murmured, hugging her as tight as he could without risk of hurting her. Her shoulders were shaking in the kind of big, ugly sobs he knew she was going to be desperately embarrassed about later. “I mean,” he said, with his own voice shaking a little, “don’t get me wrong, you’re still grounded till you’re _ninety.”_

“Okay,” Hela said, the fact that she didn’t even put up a token protest telling him exactly how scared she’d been, too.

“And, uh, Hela, sweetie?” Glancing up over her shoulder, Bucky said, “What’s with the army of robots?”

“Oh!” Hela said, turning to where a dozen Doombots were… well, _standing_ wasn’t exactly the word. Most of them were in various states of disrepair, balancing awkwardly on whatever limbs they had left, pierced through with one or more of the magical spikes that Hela had previously only ever made under strict supervision by Wanda Maximoff. “So, uh,” she began, “you know how a machine quits working and you say it’s dead? I guess they really do count as dead things, because it turns out I can... kind of... bring them back to life and make them do what I want.”

“Badass,” said Loki, appreciatively.

“Swear jar,” said Steve, which was the first time Bucky realized that Steve had taken over guard duty, keeping a white-knuckled grip on Doom’s armor-plated shoulder.

“Do you think we can keep them?” Thor asked.

“Tell Steve they’re on Day Nine,” Loki said in a stage whisper, and that wrung a laugh out of Bucky in spite of everything.

“You’re not keeping the robots,” Steve said. “And I hate to ask, but,” he gave Doom’s shoulder a shake, “what exactly are we going to do about this?”

“Unhand me, American scum,” said Doom. “You have no jurisdiction over Doom in his own country.”

“You stole a kid who’s registered on a Nova Corps planet, genius.” Rocket dropped to all fours and skittered up the throne, then rapped sharply Doom’s helmet with his fist. “Pretty sure _any_ Earth government’s response to that is gonna be, ‘Do what you want with that guy, he started it.’”

“it’s okay, Rocket.” Hela walked up to the throne and stood in front of Doom. “Listen,” she said, “Mr. von Doom—”

“Lord Doom,” Doom corrected sharply, still determined to hang onto the shreds of his dignity. “Or Doctor, if you must.”

“Nobody recognizes your Ph.D. in Evilness, Victor,” said Bucky.

“That’s a thing you can get?” Loki asked, eyes widening.

_“No,”_ Steve, Bucky, and Hela said in unison.

“Fine,” Hela said. “Lord Doom. I’m not even mad that you wanted to take my magic and use it for yourself. You’re not the first guy who did that to me, after all. I didn’t ask for my power; I didn’t even want it. It almost ruined my life. It _is_ mine, though, and you can’t just take it. I thought adults were supposed to know better than that.”

“Bravo, Hela,” Steve said softly.

“But I don’t hate you for it or anything,” Hela went on. “I mean, if you’d hurt my dad, I would’ve killed you. That’s just a fact. I don’t think I could’ve stopped. But I also don’t know what would’ve happened to me if I hadn’t had my dad or my brothers, and you don’t seem like you have anybody who could’ve helped you that way. I mean, whatever your problem is with my dad, dragging him all the way here to fight with him about it is seriously the kind of thing only somebody with no friends would do. So, is there a way you could both put it behind you? Dad,” she added, before Bucky could interrupt, “you’re the one who says it’s important to give people second chances.”

“Not when they’re crazy megaloma—” Bucky stopped, realizing who he was talking to, and sighed. “Look, yes, okay, I’m all about second chances. But people have to really _want_ that second chance; they can’t just keep hurting people again and again. And you definitely don’t give people a pass on kidnapping your children just because they don’t have any friends.”

“Doom has friends,” said Doom.

“He definitely does not,” Hela reiterated.

Bucky looked at Doom thoughtfully. He was probably never going to like the guy and he was definitely never going to trust him, but… well, Hela had proven herself to be a surprisingly good judge of character in the past. And it was true that everybody talked about how Doom was crazy, but not a lot of people talked about what it must be like to be the leader of a tiny, broke, painfully tradition-bound country that had _still_ been recovering from getting stripped bare by its bigger, louder neighbors in World War II when Thanos came along, Snapped half its tiny remaining population, and almost sent it over the brink completely.

Bucky glanced at Steve, who raised an eyebrow at him as if to say, _Up to you_ , which was not very helpful coming from the guy who was supposed to be everybody’s goddamn moral compass. But he guessed Steve had a point, because he did kind of already know what to do. “Well,” he said slowly, “I guess there is some precedent for this, now that I think about it. I mean, I might’ve gone with something a little more ‘I’ll show you mercy this once as long as you promise to change your evil ways,’ but I see what Hela’s trying to do here.”  

“If he doesn’t, we can always come back and kill him later,” Hela pointed out.

“That’s my girl.” Bucky turned to Doom. “So what do you say, Victor? Any interest in taking a second chance?”

Doom’s eyes shifted, his gaze rapidly moving from the super-soldier next to him, to the super-soldier in front of him, to the three miniature gods who were looking at him blandly, to the pile of broken robots on the floor. “It would appear Doom has little choice,” he said, in a voice that could only have come from between clenched teeth. “But Latveria _will_ require redress for your insult, Barnes.”

Bucky sighed. “Only for you, Hela,” he muttered. “Doom, I’m truly, deeply sorry for what I did to your people and your country. Attacking my children over my actions was unforgivable, but I guess I can admit that from a certain point of view, you could technically say I started it. So I do apologize for the part I played in all of this. Okay?”

“Very well,” said Doom. “Latveria accepts your apology and… is willing to ally with the Barnes family in the future, if such an allegiance is desired.”

“I’m going to friend you on Snapchat,” said Hela. “I mean, I still kind of hate you, but your robots are awesome.”

 

Hela’s bravado lasted until just about the moment they were all strapped into their seats on Rocket’s ship and heading back toward the safety of space. Then she crashed hard, and Steve took the twins up front to annoy Rocket while Bucky held her and let her cry again until the worst of it was out of her system. She’d been a goddess today and her strength astonished him, but that was no reason to expect her to stop being a kid, and she’d obviously been far more afraid than she’d let on.

“I was never scared of what he was gonna do to me,” she said. “I knew I could beat anything he threw at me. I was just scared that I wouldn’t be able to _stop.”_

“I know, baby girl,” Bucky told her. “Honestly, I was scared that I wouldn’t, either. Once you know what it’s like not being in control, that fear never really goes away. All you can do is learn to live with it. The fact is, you did stop. You were in full control of your power the whole time, and you didn’t have any trouble shutting it down when you needed to—and I’m so proud of you for that. But I might be even more proud of you because you faced this huge fear and didn’t let it stop you from doing the right thing.”

“Really?” Hela said, wiping her eyes.

“Pinky swear,” said Bucky. “Which apparently still works on your brothers, by the way. They never did tell me why you got it into your head that you needed to go to Knowhere by yourself, and I have to admit I’m still pretty curious about that.”

He was trying to change the subject, not because it wasn’t important, but because Hela was obviously exhausted, and he wanted to give her a break. But he realized too late that he’d dug his own grave, because that was when Loki, who was eavesdropping as much as he could while still pretending not to, stood up from his seat at the front of the ship and came toward the back to say, “You never told us what you did either, Dad.”

“What?” said Bucky.

“Yeah, Dad,” Thor jumped in. “What _was_ Mr. Doom so mad at you about?”

“Kids, that’s between Doom and your father,” Steve intervened. “It may be something he’d rather not talk about.”

“What?” Bucky said, and then it hit him. “Oh, crap, Steve, no. This isn’t something from my Winter Soldier days, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Well, you were speaking Latverian to Doom,” Steve pointed out.

“Yeah, but Hydra didn’t program me to be fluent in Kree, either. I pick up languages, you know that. Nah, Doom’s just still sore at me over the fact that I wouldn’t cut him in on the galactic cheese market.”

“...What,” said Steve.

“Yeah, a couple months before you… came back, Doom reached out to me about whether I’d be willing to take a bunch of Latverian cheese into space. You know that ever since the Infinity War, everybody and their goldfish has been scrambling to win the second Space Race, right? Latveria has a pretty good science program, but there’s just no way a country that’s barely bigger than Luxembourg could come up with the resources to go to space on its own, so Doom wanted to make a deal with me that would’ve helped him one-up his competition. The problem is, Latveria’s mostly mountains, and the cheese they make is this soft goat cheese that wouldn’t have lasted that well in long-term storage, so I told him it wasn’t worth the effort it was gonna take to be back and forth to Earth all the time for small-batch deliveries. It’s just plain economics, that’s all.”

“And?” said Steve.

“And what? Why does there always have to be an _and_ with you?”

“Isn’t there?” Steve said, fixing him with a hard look.

Bucky sighed. “And I may have made what were apparently some wildly offensive comments about how much better Wakandan goats are than Latverian ones. Look, goats from Wakanda eat plants with vibranium in them. Of course they’re better at being goats. I thought I was just stating an objective fact. How was I supposed to know I was insulting Latveria’s entire cultural heritage or something?”

Steve paused, taking this in. Then he said, “So I guess you could say you—”

“Don’t you dare, Rogers—”

“Got his goat,” Steve finished.

Bucky closed his eyes. “Who did I have to piss off to wind up with you?”

“At least nobody threw you at a bunch of robots today,” said Loki.

“I am Groot?”

“That’s what I thought too! But when it was actually happening, it wasn’t cool at all.”

“Oh, please,” Hela said. “If anybody gets the prize for Worst Day Ever, I think it’s me.”

“Oh, so you got a little kidnapped,” said Loki, scornfully.

“It’s worse than that,” Hela told him. “I had to pee in a bucket.”

Six pairs of male eyes looked at her blankly. Then Thor said, “I never get to pee in a bucket.”

“Oh my God, you are all such _boys,”_ Hela said, leaning back against Bucky and closing her eyes.

Bucky glanced at her, then at Steve, who nodded. “C’mon, boys, let’s go touch a bunch of things on the control panels and make your Uncle Rocket lose his mind,” he said, guiding the twins back to the front of the ship.

“Well, it’s nice to see he’s got the whole parenting thing down,” Rocket said. He was on his way back to the captain’s chair when he looked at Hela, paused, then opened a compartment under one of the seats and pulled out a blanket. “For the kid,” he said, handing it to Barnes. “But only because you two look so pathetic, not because I’m gettin’ soft or anything.”

“Wouldn’t dream of suggesting such a thing,” Bucky said, tucking the blanket around Hela, who was too close to sleep to do more than mumble a vague protest that she wasn’t tired. And she didn’t stir again that night, not even when he picked her up to carry her back to her own bed on the _Mae West,_ several hours later.

He scheduled his own meltdown for after all the kids were asleep, and the irony wasn’t lost on him when Steve did the same thing for him that he’d done for Hela, holding him and reassuring him until he felt like maybe he could halfway cope with the fact that his kids had been in danger because he’d had to go and say something about those goddamn Latverian goats. “Well, it wouldn’t exactly be the first time somebody in this family had a mouth that got them in trouble,” Steve pointed out, when he said as much, and that made him laugh, and then maybe cry a little more, which Steve was pretty patient about, all things considered. It was going to take him a while to get over what _could_ have happened, even though it _hadn’t_ happened. That was okay, though; it wouldn’t be the worst thing he’d ever had to deal with. And, hell, whatever did happen next, they’d deal with it as a family.

In light of everything that had happened, he expected to have a hard time getting to sleep. But in addition to the fact that every cell in his body was exhausted, Steve was a hell of a comfortable pillow, and Bucky was out like a light before it occurred to him to kick Steve out of the room or lock the bedroom door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this only took a month longer than I was planning! Thanks for your patience.
> 
> Sometimes family is two super-soldiers, three small gods, a wolf, a space pig, and whatever assortment of robot pieces Loki may or may not have smuggled home for future reanimation.


	13. Chapter 13

In the morning, Bucky woke up a medley of sounds: small feet pounding in the hallway outside his bedroom, laughter that could only belong to the twins, and Steve, underneath him, groaning. “Kids’re’up,” he muttered at Bucky, with his face still mashed into the pillow.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Bucky tried to say, but what came out was, “Nngh.” He raised his left arm to shove Steve so he’d roll over, then watched in mild, sleepy confusion when the arm disobeyed him and fell limply back to the mattress. Fuck, he’d really done a number on what was left of his shoulder yesterday. Oh, well, at least it wasn’t a school day. Or if it was, then it was a shame about the mystery illness all three of the kids were about to come down with, because lying to the school tomorrow sounded infinitely preferable to packing three lunchboxes today. Still, it’d be a shame if any of the kids murdered each other so soon after the whole family-bonding-through-robot-punching experience, so he rolled out of bed, stumbled over to the door, and pushed it open—or tried to; it only pushed outward half an inch before it hit some solid, immovable obstacle. “What the hell?” he said.

“Swear jar,” Steve murmured, raking a hand through his hair. Christ, even with a serious case of bedhead, he still managed to look fucking delectable. “You know,” he added, raising himself up on one arm to look at Bucky, “you never did explain that to me. I get the concept, but not why the kids are so into it.”

“You mean besides the fact that they love seeing the adult mess up and get called on it? It’s because I told them that once we’ve got enough money socked away, I’m using it to take them to Disney World.” Bucky gave the door another experimental shove, and this time his efforts were met with a soft giggle, followed by some frantic shushing noises. “Steve,” he said, “there’s something wrong with this door. Come over here and give it a push, wouldja?”

“What do you think I can do that your metal arm can’t?” When Bucky just raised an eyebrow and jerked his head at the door, Steve sighed, “Fine,” and got up, giving the door a tentative push. “S’weird,” he said, bracing his feet for a long, hard shove. There was a scraping sound of a heavy metal object moving across the floor, and Steve stepped forward and immediately tripped, gracelessly, over Mjolnir’s handle. “What the he-e-eck,” he stammered, catching himself just before he spat out a different word, and Bucky leaned around him to find Thor, Loki, and Groot staring back at them.

“I knew it,” Thor crowed at his brother, who was momentarily dumbstruck.

“Thor, Mjolnir is a serious tool and it isn’t meant to be used for practical jokes,” Bucky said, because he’d just had a terrible vision of a future full of pranks involving bathroom doors and toilet lids. “What’s Groot doing here? Not that you aren’t welcome, Groot, I just wasn’t expecting you.”

“I am Groot,” said Groot.

“Rocket said you owed him from last night and you had a reciprocal babysitting arrangement,” Loki explained, with all the relish of just having learned a new word he was actually allowed to say to grownups. “Also, it wasn’t a practical joke. Hela said not to let you leave the bedroom because she was gonna bring you breakfast in bed, and _you_ said we should listen to our big sister, so—”

“Loki, it’s too early in the morning for your lawyer schtick,” Bucky said, brushing past the kids to walk toward the kitchen. He shoved open the door with his right arm and found Hela with a frying pan, dishing food out onto plates. “What’s all this?”

“Ugh, _Dad,_ you were supposed to stay in bed and let me bring you breakfast,” Hela lamented. “It’s ham and cheese omelettes and they took forever.”

“I could go back to bed.”

“It wouldn’t be the same,” Hela said, her tone very adult and very weary. “We can all eat here. Just don’t touch the one without ham in it. That one’s for me.”

Bucky frowned. “Seems like you’re forgetting something here, kiddo.”

“Nope,” Hela said. “I’m not vegan anymore. I’m vegetarian now.”

“And what prompted this change of heart?”

“I’ve been reading about ethical farming and how it’s good to support eco-friendly farmers who do stuff like preserving heritage breeds and crop diversity. And you get most of our food from Wakanda, which means it’s all cruelty-free. So I decided things like eggs and milk could go back on the menu.”

“Okay. You know I’m always gonna respect whatever you decide to do, but I’m happy to see you doing the research and refining your thinking on this.”

“Yep,” Hela said. “And you know what else this means?”

“No, what?”

“It means I’m allowed to eat every kind of cheese in the world _except_ for stinky awful disgusting Latverian goat cheese, and every time I do I’m gonna send a Snapchat to Doctor Doom about it.”

“Hela, I don’t have the words for how much I love you right now.” Bucky sat down at the table. “Before we eat, there’s something I want to talk to you about. Can you sit down for a minute?”

“You and Steve are sleeping together,” Hela said nonchalantly. “I  know.”

Bucky’s jaw dropped. “When did you find this out?”

“About an hour ago, when I came to tell you I couldn’t find the Sacred Reznor.”

Oh, _shit,_ the Reznor! Bucky had left Fenris curled up at the foot of Hela’s bed, but what with everything, he hadn’t thought to shut the door of the Reznor’s crate so it could teleport in for safety (and wasn’t it just fascinating how quickly _that_ had become a normal thing in his life). “What happened? Is it—”

“Oh my gosh, Dad, look,” Hela said, pointing, and when Bucky did, he made an audible “aww” sound in spite of himself. Fenris was curled up in the bed of old blankets they’d made for him in the corner of the kitchen—had it really only been a couple of days ago?—and the Reznor was lying beside him, sleeping the sleep of the blissfully unconcerned, with Fenris’s massive snout on its piggy flank.

“I’ll be damned,” Bucky said. “Looks like they’re friends now.”

“I told you Fenris was a good dog,” Hela said. “Anyway, back to you and Steve and how you really should’ve _told_ us you knew you were in love with each other, Dad.”

“You’re right,” Steve said. He’d been standing in the doorway; now he came over and sat down at the table. The twins trailed in after him and took their seats as well, and Groot came in behind all of them, reaching up a branch and pulling himself up to the remaining chair. “We should have filled you in on everything from the beginning. And it can be pretty hard for both of us to talk about the past, but it’s time you knew the whole story.”

“It’s not just the past,” Bucky said. He was fidgeting with a fork on the table, and he put it down when he realized his metal fingers had been about to bend the tines. “It’s a little bit the future too.”

It was Steve, not Hela, who asked, “What do you mean, Buck?”

“Well, the truth is…” Bucky was avoiding eye contact with both of them, and that was bullshit; he made himself look each of the kids in the face. “There’s this very complicated thing called the multiverse, and we’re not always sure how it works, especially not after the Infinity War ripped a couple holes in spacetime, which is a whole other thing. But what happens is—”

“Is Steve from a parallel universe?” Thor interrupted.

Bucky stared at him. “How the he—how did you guess that?”

“I couldn’t figure out why else you both thought the other one was dead,” Thor said, with a shrug. “So then I thought, what if that was the point of divergence? That would make sense, right?”

 _Jeez,_ Bucky thought. The kid had a way of lulling him into complacency, only to remind him exactly how smart he could be when he was paying attention. “Yeah, that’s exactly what happened,” he said. “Your Aunt Shuri did some tests and confirmed it. It seems like Steve got brought here from a parallel universe somehow, and it also seems like he’s the only thing that came over—as far as we can tell; it’s a big universe, after all. Your Aunt Shuri doesn’t think that process could reverse itself naturally, and I’ve never seen her be wrong yet; she also says that the longer Steve stays, the more this universe treats him like he belongs here and wants to keep him where he is. But the thing is, we still aren’t sure how he got here in the first place. I asked Steve to keep this from you for a lot of reasons, but I guess I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I didn’t want to promise you kids he was staying forever until _I_ was sure he was staying forever. So as long as we’re doing true confessions here, I didn’t tell you this earlier because it scared me, and I’m sorry.”

There was a small throat-clearing noise at the far end of the table.

Everyone turned, and Loki narrowed his eyes. “Groot, so help me, you _better_ not,” he said, but Groot blinked at him innocently, turned to face Bucky, and said, “I am Groot.”

“...What?” said Bucky.

“Oh my God, Groot, I’m gonna kill you!” Hela cried, and then blushed when she realized what she’d said. “Not really, I just—nobody was supposed to tell! Who told him?” she demanded of her brothers. _“Who told him?”_

“Hela—” Bucky said, looking shell-shocked.

“Don’t even start with me,” said Loki. “I’m the one who ate fourteen bananas for you.”

“I think you guys broke Dad,” Thor said, in an alarmed whisper.

“Hela,” Bucky repeated, “is this true? Did you really do that for me?”

“I’m definitely missing something,” said Steve.

“I didn’t mean to rip a hole in the universe,” Hela said, looking frightened. “I just—I just told the magic to find your soulmate, no matter how far away he w—” Her words cut off in a squeak, because Bucky had jumped up from his chair and was hugging the breath out of her, tears standing in his eyes.

“I should have known all along,” he said. “If there’s anybody who could beat death with love, it’s you, baby girl. You’re a gift to this universe, Hela, and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. And you boys, get in here too,” he said, grabbing the twins—both of whom looked like they were about to make a break for it—and pulling them into the hug circle. After a moment, Fenris got up and wrapped his enormous black body around Hela as well. The Sacred Reznor, never one to be left out, snorted and came over to join the party, plopping itself down decisively at Bucky’s feet.

“I hope you’re not expecting me to hug you,” Steve told Groot, who looked properly horrified. “Okay, well, not to make this moment about me, but, Bucky? When you have a second, there’s something I’d like to ask you.” He knelt in front of the four Barneses, drawing a small box out of the pocket of his pajama pants. The box was Jabari wood; the ring inside was vibranium, paper-thin but unbreakable, already sized for Bucky’s metal hand. Shuri had handed it to him before he left Wakanda, ‘for whenever you need it,’ and obviously, the time was now. “James Buchanan Barnes,” he said, “will you space-marry me?”

Bucky’s face took on an unreadable expression. “Hang on,” he said, disentangling himself from the kids and hurrying back to his bedroom. The Time Stone in his sock drawer briefly lit up his face with green light as he fished around for the _other_ most important thing he owned—another box, functionally identical to Steve’s, except that the Wakandan equivalents of the letters **S.R.** were carved into it instead of **B.B.** “Your Aunt Shuri is a meddling busybody,” he told the kids, before taking the box out of Steve’s hand and replacing it with his own. “Steven Grant Rogers, I will absolutely space-marry you, but only if you space-marry me first.”

“Eeeee,” said Hela, very softly. Then she said, “Oh,” because Groot had opened up his branches, and she knew what he was about to do. She reached behind her and flicked off the light switch just as Groot sent out a thousand tiny glowing spores, which filled the room with flickering, floating lights.  

“Wow,” said Bucky, softly.

“Yeah,” Steve said, without taking his eyes off Bucky’s face, bathed in the gold glow.

“I have a question about what I have to wear to this wedding,” said Loki.

“I have a question about cake,” said Thor.

“Oh my _God,_ you two, give them a minute,” said Hela, but she couldn’t stop grinning long enough to put any force behind the words.

“That does bring up a good question, though,” Steve said. He still hadn’t looked away from Bucky. “Who does have the authority to marry us? You live in space and I’m not from this universe.”

“Well, traditionally, ship captains can do a marriage onboard their own vessel, so Rocket probably qualifies,” Bucky said, and gave Steve a moment to contemplate that in horror before he laughed. “I’ll space-marry you or Brooklyn-marry you or anything else you want, but I was thinking I’d like to Wakanda-marry you, if that sounds all right.”

“Fine. No goats at the ceremony, though.”

“Aw.”

“Captain Barnes,” the voice of the _Mae_ ’s A.I. interjected smoothly, “you have a private hail from an approaching vessel. Would you like to take it in your quarters?”

“What?” Bucky said. “We just got engaged, how did Natasha find out so—” Then he stopped. “Approaching vessel, you say.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Which meant there was a possibility the visitor was Carol or Nebula or Gamora, or even Shuri, who he wouldn’t put it past to build her own private spaceship and take it on a test run without telling anybody, but somehow he had a hunch it wasn’t anything that simple. “Everything happens so much,” he sighed, another phrase he’d learned from Shuri, and got up. “I gotta take this. It’s probably business,” he said, getting up from his chair and grabbing the cup of coffee Hela had poured him. “Gotta make the space money to pay for this space wedding.”

“Daaad,” Hela said, rolling her eyes. “I keep telling you nobody talks like that. Stop being such a weird nerd.”

“If I’m a weird nerd and you’re my daughter, then what does that make you?”

“Embarrassed,” said Hela.

“Ouch,” Bucky said, deeply pleased at how much of a Barnes his daughter managed to be in spite of everything. “You guys go ahead and eat. Hopefully I’ll just be a minute.”

When he got to his office, the image was already up on the screen, and he slid into his chair and nodded respectfully. “Hello, Frigga,” he said.

“Hello, Bucky.” Frigga was standing at the helm of her nifty little Asgardian cruiser in a gown with strategic armor plating and her hair done up around her head like a crown, looked every inch the goddess of destiny, and Bucky was abruptly very aware of the fact that his hair was all over the place and he was wearing the sleepy-bilgesnipe pajamas the kids had gotten him for Fathers’ Day. “Come aboard my ship. I want to speak with you.”

“Oh, I, uh—” was as far as Bucky got before his office dissolved around him and he was standing in front of Frigga. The _Mae_ was theoretically supposed to be able to stop anybody from doing that to him, but Frigga was very much a law unto herself. “You know, you could let a guy finish his coffee before you do that,” he said, to cover how much his heart was suddenly pounding. He had no idea what could be so important that she’d come all this way in person. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I’m not here to take the children back,” Frigga said, and whatever face he made, she laughed softly at it. “A mixed blessing, I suspect.”

“After yesterday, I couldn’t really have blamed you. I feel like I fucked up pretty big there.” Belatedly realizing he’d just said a Swear Jar word to an actual goddess, he added, awkwardly, “Ma’am.”

Frigga shrugged. “No parent is perfect. You brought them home safely; that’s all I can ask. Well, that and perhaps a few more vegetables in the boys’ diets.”

“The only way I’ve found to get Loki to eat anything green is to smother it in melted cheddar, but I’ll give it a shot. So what did bring you out here, then?”

“I wanted to offer you my congratulations on your engagement,” said Frigga. “And give you two things. The first is a gift for you.” She handed him a small scroll.

Bucky took it and unrolled it far enough to look at the text, then shook his head. “I don’t read Asgardian.”

“It’s a voucher, my dear. Your choice of two goats from the palace herd in Asgard.” When he looked at her blankly, she explained, “When Asgardians marry, it’s customary for the family to make them a gift of livestock for their new homestead.”

“Well—thank you, Frigga, but I can’t accept this. For one thing, my homestead is, uh, more of a spaceship, and I’m kind of running out of space for the livestock I have already.”

“Put it away, then, until the time is right. I foresee a return to Earth for you in the not so distant future. When you're ready, I suggest you choose a breeding pair. They should get along with the Wakandan varieties you favor quite nicely.”

Bucky opened his mouth, then closed it again, then shook his head. He wasn’t about to start an argument with the goddess of destiny, and he definitely wasn’t about to risk insulting somebody’s goats again _this_ soon. “I didn’t even realize you had goats on Asgard,” he said.

“Of course we do. Why do you think we need such fearsome dogs if not to guard them?”

“Yep, fearsome,” Bucky agreed, deciding not to mention that his terrifying Asgardian guard dog spent his days cuddling a space pig and stealing cheese. “Thank you, Frigga. This is a lovely gift. What’s the second thing?”

“Something for Loki,” she said. “Since he wouldn’t have been able to enjoy it properly on his birthday.”

“I wondered, what with the other two getting presents,” Bucky said, as he took the box she held out to him and reached for the lid. “Gotta say, I’m glad to see it’s not a taller box. I was halfway afraid you were gonna give me that godawful tacky gold helmet that he used to—oh. Hey, would you look at that. The horns come off to make it easier to pack. How delightful.”

“It may keep him just a little bit safer, should he find his way along on any of your future adventures. And his previous incarnation seemed to enjoy it so much.”

Bucky tried not to groan. “I’ll give it to him,” he promised. Then he thought about it for a second, and added, “Unless you’d like to come aboard and give it to him yourself.”

It was only the second time he’d ever seen Frigga look surprised—the first time had been the first glimpse she caught of him when he came for the kids in the first place—and she recovered from this one just as quickly as she had back then. She shook her head. “Soon,” she said. “When they’re a little older. But for the moment, they have all the family they need.”

Bucky nodded, shifting the box in his hands. He’d have to come up with some excuse to give it to Loki without implying that it meant he was allowed to get into any more trouble, and also make it clear that it wasn’t suitable attire for a wedding, but Steve would help him figure it out. That was what families were for. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “So do I.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it!
> 
> The plan is definitely to have a sequel or sequels. I can't promise when, but I'm definitely as eager as anyone to find out what happens when Steve and Bucky take the Odinbrood to Disney World.
> 
> Headcanons and plotbunnies for this universe are warmly welcomed. Again, no promises, but I'm keeping a document of inspirations for the future.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
